Godclads

Chapter 2-14 Heaveneater

“Whatever you do, do not graft more Ontologics than your thaumic mass can bear. Do not. Are you hearing me? Do not. The system can’t support it. It’ll make your Heaven fall and have you start looping deaths until you manage to fix whatever’s causing the dysfunction in your Heaven.

Keep a least twenty thaums of mass between your maximum sustainable mass and what you have functionally equipped. It will allow you to make the necessary changes you need. Tweak your builds for survival.

Second thing is to keep an eye on your Rend. Don’t vent your Hell unless you need to; let it digest slowly or you will find yourself vulnerable during expulsion. Mortal.

Tempo, tempo, tempo.

Never overextend. Overusing your Heavens will also see you isolated and killed. Hells, worse yet, the enemy might force you into creating a Rupture by making you overload, see your cadre snuffed alongside your incompetent ass…"

-Santanado “Starsinger” Mondelles, Combat Instructor to Axtraxis Academy of Highflame

2-14

Heaveneater

For moments, Avo lost focus. The world grew distant around him. His sight and hearing went in cycles. His skin felt prickly. The agony of his wounds folded into numbness then back again. In bouts of delirium, he laughed and hissed in equal measure. If he had the strength or coordination, he would have tried biting Draus, if only to taste the sweetness of flesh one last time.

As she ran, he clung to her, to life. His blood spilled out from his brutalized body, leaving a trail behind him. He was jealous of the humans then. Even the flats.

At least they could pass out fully from the pain.

Here then was another benefit of his blood; a ghoul's cells served as an extension to their mind. Their haemophagic cells formed a hyper-conductive synaptic fluid that supported consciousness. The fact that Avo found himself drifting in and out of awareness meant his blood loss was somewhere north of severe.

For the third time that day, he was close to crossing over into the Big Nothing.

His arms dragged against the ground. They were too long. Each bounce ignited coiling pain in his left shoulder where his arm had torn free from the socket, dangling. Internally, he was almost out of metabolism to burn.

A crash sounded behind him. Struggling, he found himself barely able to look up. The world around him was a blur of motion. Draus was going fast. The golem behind them was still coming, still charging. It had adopted a tide-like structure to its lower half, sweeping forward and knocking all in its path aside like a tsunami of melted plascrete that carried a quavering, shrinking tower.

The golem had paid a price for this realignment of its alchemy. Going from metal to plascrete was a great transition. The matter and molecular structures were too different. The cost could be seen in the jetstreams of blood peeling around the sides of the golem-like wings. These jetstreams were not alchemized into plascrete. They were just mundane. Basic blood.

The god was shedding its flesh, waning in the struggle against reality. Getting slower.

Avo hacked a wet laugh. “Might…might live…after…” The words grew slippery. His thoughtstuff fogged his accretion like vapors, lacking any solidity. The world around him grew distant again.

A curtain of shadows descended. Chaotic rainfall down the windshield of his consciousness. The colors of the world bled from the canvas of his cog-feed. Sound droned away into silence. His senses sank into the abyss beneath his flesh.

For a beat, there was nothing. Pleasantly nothing. No thoughts. No awareness. No pain. Perhaps this was what it was like to die the final time. The Big Nothing. A place beyond any paradise or eternal torment. Just a final stop where everything was not.

Then, he felt the cold touch of metal press against his back. Beneath him, gears and servos groaned. Energy thrummed below him. He was rising, carried on a pedestal.

A small, warm hand caressed his face before something snatched it away.

Avo gasped, air wheezing through his collapsed lung. Awareness exploded out from the center of his mind. Draus was staring down at him, her face battered. Bruised. The wounds were new. When had she gotten them? Pain clung to his every sinew, every pore. With one hand, she was holding the boy back while the father watched. The child had been reaching for him, trying to touch him.

Slowly, it dawned on him that they were on the platform, that they were going up. Stacks were sinking below them as they ascended slowly. In the far distance, some twelve rows of overturned containers away, an ominous spire of red was still rushing toward them.

“Infectious,” Avo said. His word came as a choked gasp. Dead gods, he wanted to tear the boy apart. Eat him. Eat his father. “Infectious…to…”

Good that Draus pulled the boy back. They didn’t have the vaccine in them yet. His blood could convert anything that had a bit of brain, enough biomass, and insufficient immuno-defenses to overcome his cells into a ghoul-nest.

Same as the ghoul that sired him. Even now, he could remember eating out from his nest, the first to hatch from the long cold corpse of his host.

“Golem,” he said, trying to point with his working arm. He just didn’t have the strength. His left arm resembled a mangled clump of meat now. Better that he lost it entirely. Trying to heal it in its current state would undoubtedly leave him with tumors. He drew what blood was left out from the limb and let it die.

“You're hurt!” the father proclaimed. Avo wanted to strangle the man. He knew he was hurt. He could feel every bit of that hurt.

“Really,” Avo said, staring at the rapidly decaying clump he had for an arm, “this my blood?’

Draus laughed. “Don’t worry about her. She’s behind us. We’re gonna make it. We’re gonna make it.” Draus knelt down next to him. Strangely, it was as if her eyes were staring through him, seeing someone else in his stead. “It’s almost midnight. Just gotta get you outside. Out beneath the rain. You’ll live. You’ll live.”

With an uncertain look, she drew a small knife from beneath the glitching veil of her damaged holocoat. She pulled out a small knife and dragged it across her arm. Holding it above him, she drip-fed him a steady flow of blood, an odd look of consternation clouding her face. “How’s this for service, citizen.”

Avo didn’t speak. He was too busy lapping the flowing liquid. It poured down his throat, tasting thicker and more clotted than any he had ever sampled. Inside, his remaining cells met the nanosurgeons in open battle. Her internal augmentations were far superior to his biology, but en masse his cells could still overwhelm a nanomachine’s capacity to fend. When he finally broke her nanite defenders down enough, he thought he just might live off the nutritional richness in her blood alone instead of ever even needing to feel the touch of the midnight rains.

Every few seconds, she had to reopen her arm. She scabbed too quickly for it to stay a wound. He didn’t complain. As long as she was willing to bleed, he was willing to feed. Desperate to feed. For a few moments, he nursed, until she finally drew the knife away. Instinctively, he bit at her, snarling, wanting more.

She held him back with a single arm as he struggled to get at her. A wry smirk tugged at a corner of her lip. “Right, you had enough there, joy-fiend.”

Avo wrestled a modicum of control back from the beast. If he wasn’t such mangled effigy, he would have undoubtedly tried to eat her or go after the boy and his father.

“Wanted eyes,” he muttered.

“Still need ‘em, consang,” she said. “Besides. Don’t think you’d like the circuitry.”

Avo laid back and laughed. He hurt. Everything hurt.

Sinking his perception into the Nether, he could see a literal forest of Specters looking down at them, spectral chains coiling, like a bird’s nest in the Nether. Savaged as he was, he could hear the whispers. Violent arguments clashed between different spectators, their phantasmal sequences lashing out at each other. There was dismay in his survival; joy in his triumph; confusion as to why Draus hadn’t left him; mockery at Little Vicious’ failure.

A storm of secondhand thoughts leaked out, washing over his mind in a near-deafening echo.

Survived. He had survived. Avo laughed, his voice a low chuckle not of joy, but pale triumph. It looked like death wouldn’t claim him after–

A thoughtwave bomb opened a gouge between tides of thought. An open chasm of silence drowned every mind, scouring every Specter from sight.

A blankness hewed deep through Avo’s mind, his surface thoughts dismembered from him, with only his Metamind guarded that which lay deeper. Draus staggered much the same way, a momentary incomprehension flashing over her eyes as, for a fleeting moment, she forgot where she was.

To the side, the father and son cried out in unison, toppling over and clutching their heads.

And synchronized with their fall, the tower that was the golem crumbled in the distance, splashing down as if a geyser of blood frozen in the first of time, now released. Uncontrolled, it splashed down amidst the stacks, painting the ground red. The blood seeped out, the spill expanding.

Except, there was something wrong. Except, Avo saw a single trail already painted, leading out from ahead of the golem, headed right beneath their platform.

Through his cog-feed, Avo caught sight of a flash of thoughtstuff. “Dra–”

Pointed and red, something tore through the underside between him and Draus, curving limbs scything savagely.

Violence erupted.

The attack came fast. Faster than Avo could perceive. Faster than even Draus could trigger her reflex booster. A dozen flicking wires clipped and bit through her flesh at the same time a ten-foot palm slammed into her, flattening her into the pillar upon which the platform was climbing.

The elevator groaned as sparks sprayed from Draus' back, her armored vest scraping against aged bronze.

Avo tried to rise, but a stinging lance plunged through his gut. He howled. Something inside him tore with a sickening snap. In the corner of his eye, Draus fired her implant and blurred. With a titanic effort, she pushed past the hand and dove low as nano-thin spearheads guided on slicing wires lanced out for her.

Where once Draus was on defense, the initiative now shifted back to her.

The construct facing her was far too small to be called a tower, but it loomed all the same. Now scarcely twenty feet wide and half again as tall, Little Vicious’ golem greeted them in a diminished, but much quicker form.

Looking upon it, Avo suddenly realized what must’ve happened. Little Vicious must have abandoned the bulk of her golem’s blood at some point, choosing instead to puppet it from afar as a decoy while her true, far lighter form pushed forward using the momentary cover of a thoughtwave bomb.

Weaponless, weary, battered, and bloodied, Draus was still the one to make her approach first. Avo had no idea how she was going to punch through the shell of the golem but quickly realized that might not have been her plan at all.

Avo found himself in admiration of Draus’ mastery of distance as she moved and shifted, pulling the golem out of place and subtly circling it. She was faster than he could perceive most times, but still, it was a sight to behold. Little Vicious had all the advantage in force and durability, but it was squandered in the hands of a wailing, tantrum-throwing pilot.

Wide slashings and expanding phalanxes of spears jutted out from the golem. Each second she fought, the golem shrank, waning, burning through what little fire its miracle had left in it.

Again, Avo noticed that the metallic glint of the golem’s blood had returned. Foolish. She had alchemized back over to some kind of alloy. Must’ve decided plascrete couldn’t cut it.

For the next few heartbeats, the dance continued. Draus made a feint of holding in place to bait the golem over before vanishing in a blur or bobbing past it. Frustrated, Little Vicious cast her blood out in a flood, spreading her reach across the surface they were standing on: the same trick she used to trap Avo earlier.

But Draus knew her enemy. Had faced them during the war. Just as the blood began to pool, Draus blinked. A flashing echo of her presence pulsed beside the golem, followed by the crack of an echoing hook punching through the sound barrier. Layers of blood hardened reflexively, but the golem still had to shape a dozen hands from its frame to stop itself from tumbling over the edge.

At the sight, comprehension began to bloom in Avo’s mind–a new gnosis of violence. Focus, then, was also a danger unto itself. For in the limit of this golem, that which it devoted to harm was stripped from its ability to protect, and its offering of mass had left it vulnerable to momentum.

Right now, Draus had speed, and so she determined all engagements. Little Vicious, despite controlling everything else, had failed to pit force against force and was now facing a battle of position or attrition.

A battle she was certain to lose.

Which was likely why she did what she always did when things were going against her. In an act of low-cunning, she flipped the board, and, as she lumbered forward to face Draus, shaped a tendril from behind the golem and seized the boy by his nape.

The father cried out. Avo flopped over, body too broken to rise, unable to do anything but watch.

With a contemptuous fling, she cast the screaming child over the edge.

Just in time for Draus to blink over to catch him.

Just in place for a scything blade of red to claim both her legs.

Both Draus and the boy toppled, going down in a heap. Still, blinding fast, Draus shuffled along her back and fought from a shuffle as if she never lost her legs at all. Still, she wasn’t nearly fast enough to avoid what came next.

A flat slab extended from the golem and hammered down. +Fucking! Sow!+ Little Vicious’ seething malice had a tangible taste in the air. A tonnage of pass peeled from the increasingly unsteady golem, hammering down against Draus. Once. Twice. Thrice.

Avo heard something break inside Draus. He could smell the bleeding.

Still, the Reg rose, spraying blood out her nose in disrespect.

Little Vicious howled. +Fucking! Fall! Fall! Fuck you! Fall!+ She hammered Draus into the pillar next to Avo, a cleave trailing right after her. The blade sank slick through Draus shoulder and levered. Draus’ eye barely twitched as her shoulder popped. Another blade sawed out, the remaining mass of the golem descending hard.

Avo watched as the golem buried itself deep and wretched Draus’ arm free from its socket. Laughing with exhausted relief, Little Vicious threw Draus next to Avo. The Regular toppled. Her wounds were already scabbing, but she was wheezing, dazed, and broken.

Looking at her savaged state filled Avo with an injection of existential dread. She wasn’t invincible. He knew that. He knew that Regulars could die. But seeing how Draus was, how much she’d taken, and now seeing her like this…

It filled him with a reminder of mortality.

How fast did hope rise? And how quick was it to plunge?

He barely reacted when a spearing hook of blood metal skewered him and drew him up into the air like a lanced fish. With his back toward the platform and the shining lights of the megablock’s lobby glaring down at him from the encroaching gap above, Avo exhaled.

He checked his cog-feeds. Systems were still destabilized. Overloaded. A pity. He would’ve liked ward-bashing her one more time before he went.

He had nothing left.

Draus had nothing left.

So close. But not enough.

Surrounded on an island untouched by the anomalous blood, the father and son clung to each other, horror staining their faces. The man held his auto-laser with quavering hands. The gun was clicking. Empty. Avo hadn’t even noticed him fire it. And neither did Little Vicious for that matter.

Not until right then.

A thread lashed out from the surrounding pool and pierced through the father’s shoulder. Bone fragments burst and skin tore. The man toppled in a scream. The boy followed, clinging to his father, wailing.

Avo forced himself to forget their faces. There was no point in seeing them as people now. Death was here for them, and it wanted its fill.

Again, tendrils of blood began to spread like metal roots within Avo. The renewed pain worked animalistic cries of pain he thought himself beyond making. She worked him twice as intricately this time. His muscles screamed. He felt the unmistakable sensation of something drilling through his bones, sawing through the remainder of his tendons, piercing through what organs he had.

He realized then that she was growing what amounted to a tree inside him. A thing rooted to him by pain.

And halfway through the spreading of the branches, she stopped.

If Avo had the ability to weep, he would’ve. At that moment, he would have collapsed to his knees and proclaimed his abuser the patron saint of mercy for stopping the hurt.

But this wasn’t a culmination. No. Just punctuation; a lull before the next course.

Faintly, Avo heard Little Vicious laughing through the Nether. She sounded close. Felt close. She pulled him back and held him up next to her.

The golem wasn’t so large anymore at all. From its considerable mass of over eighty tons, he doubted she was operating with more than three right now. So thin were her defenses that he could practically reach out and touch the command module, its vents pumping and sparking, one pluming smoke and darkness into the blood from overwork.

+Thought I was just going to give up?+ Little Vicious said, her voice seething like a crackling fire. +All of you are going to die. All of you!+

The boy flinched as he pressed his palm to his father’s wound. The man’s breathing was labored. Tears flowed from his eyes. Terror emanated from his naked mind.

“Why?” the father cried, leaning against his son. “Why? Why? We just want to come to the city! We have done you no wrong? Committed no ill.”

Little Vicious scoffed. +Because you dying gets me views, half-strand!+ She was going to say something else but ended up laughing instead. When she next spoke, her words were tinged with pure cruelty. +Observe.+

A crudely-shaped pike punched through the boy's gut from behind, tearing him off the ground. Avo heard the father shrieking in despair, blood-formed limbs holding him against the ground while tilting his head up, forcing him to watch.

The boy’s face paled. He clutched at his chest as his eyes bulged. Redness poured from his mouth as he went stiff in shock. Three more haemokinetic hands forced the boy’s mouth open.

+What was that you called them,+ Little Vicious asked. +Choiceless?+ She chuckled. +Yeah. I…I like the term. It fits.+

Even through the pain, Avo knew what she was going to do. Was horrified by it. Had spent his entire life avoiding it. “No,” he pleaded, his voice barely a whisper. This wasn’t his choice. He didn’t want this. “Kill me. Kill me. Not this.”

He knew begging was wrong when he heard Little Vicious laugh. “It’s not up to you, consang.”

Held over the boy, Avo struggled with all that he had left, trying to escape before the inevitable. Below, he could hear the father roaring, straining. Draus pawed weakly toward the sound, crawling with her one remaining limb.

The boy stared up at Avo in horror, mouth open, weeping.

“Didn’t want this,” Avo said, trying to convey his regret. The beast hungered for the boy’s flesh yet, desperate for meat on the cusp of death. The rest of him loathed every second of this. He had struggled, fought so hard to keep his fate his own. All taken by a teenage psychopath who just wanted more eyes on her product. “Would’ve killed you. Spared you–”

Grasping limbs sank into the flesh of his back. Fingers pushed through his shoulder blades, dislodging his spine and mangling his flesh to bloody pap. The world disappeared into a miasma of agony. His blood poured free, raining down with his viscera into the boy’s open mouth.

Infecting him.

Cackling with laughter, Little Vicious watched her work. Her pointless work. The ghosts were gone. Her thoughtwave bomb had ensured that. A child was dying for her amusement alone. The boy spasmed in the grip of her fists, his body twitching. Gore-stained foam bubbled from his mouth as his eyes rolled back and his biomass began to grow sallow.

+Look at that,+ Little Vicious whispered. Avo realized she was recording the moment. Saving it for upload later. “Think of the views for this night.” She sniffled. +This perfect, perfect night. It’s all thanks to you, ghoulie. All thanks to you. Here: your reward.+

The limbs holding his insides tugged in opposite directions. Barely managing a final howl, Avo came apart in two. The light went out of his eye as the last sinews within his skull tore in twain.

For the third time, the jaws of death clamped down upon Avo.

But neither darkness nor memory greeted him this time. Instead, he felt the shaped blood that killed him descend with him into the throes of death.

Downward, he descended into the embrace of an inverted flame.

INITIALIZING RESURRECTION - 1%

ATTENTION - HEAVEN DETECTED [DOMAIN: BLOOD; MATTER]

  DESIGNATION: SANGEIST

NO LIMINAL BOUNDARY DETECTED

EXTRACTING HEAVEN - INITIALIZING GRAFT - 1%