Brent Stinebaker
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31-10 False Deliverance (II)
🕑 Added 2024-11-20 12:23:35 +0000 UTCYou know how the best shot I ever knew died? Caught a cough during a No-Dragon blitz plague. Decided to forego wearing his rig on a trip to his local grafters. Another case: Skullpop, nova Necro and trauma-sequencer extraordinaire. Got done by his own cheapness—aero fell out of the sky because the “discounted mod-jobs” he kept having his cousin do resulted in the engine being overtaxed and the front half of the vehicle being too heavy.
Shit. Closest I came to death in a long time was when I looked up at the sky at the wrong place at the wrong time. Must’ve glimpsed a rupture or something, but I damn near got cut in half by a lens flare from a nearby window—had to cauterize my upper body back together down the middle.
Look. The point is: shit can surprise you. No one really matters that much in New Vultun. But. However. If you can. Have a consang watch over you on a job if you can. Gives you a bit more of a chance…
-Quail Tavers, The School of the Warrens
31-10
False Deliverance (II)
—[Draus]—
Draus didn’t know what to expect from the Heaven of Love in terms of combat, but seeing Uthred Greatling’s halo fracture from a supercharged orgasm was beyond her imagination.
At Chambers’ command, the former Authority’s eyes widened, his arms shivered. The flames that made his manifestation—his greatsword—burst apart in a questionable spray of embers. A loud gasp escaped the man as his legs went stiff and straight, and there, before three old enemies and his son, Uthred Greatling arrived for the first time in years.
What the fuck might have been the proper response for such a moment, the surrealism was broken as the Deliverer exploded forth. Draus by manifesting her Simulacrae via the monitors behind Mondelles—and sinking into the innermost threshold of her Manifold Paracosmos where time was almost at a standstill.
Shotin, Chambers, Vator, Mondelles, and Uthred were nearly frozen. But the Deliverer was undeterred. Through a screen made from Uthred’s sparking embers, Draus’ pathborn twin arrived, its rusted cannon of a head smoking with the stretch of destruction, its arms ringing frequency blades that could sever anything.
And sever anything they did.
The tethers that composed Chambers Heaven, the Lovebringer, were reaching into Uthred’s flames—leaping from his entwined body. They dangled as long threads of magenta, groping where the Deliverer used to be but wasn’t anymore. And though the limbs of love could traverse the chaos of continuum with correspondence, that didn’t make them unbreakable; unseverable.
The Deliverer sliced through Chambers’ Bonds with contempt, and an oscillation of Soulfire shot backward, passing through Uthred—who was crying, biting his lips—back toward the Lovebringer to arrive as thaumic backlash.
With the continuum destablized, the form of the Deliverer flickered. It went from being the size of a gnat to that of a titan. Draus’ phys-sim glitched as it tried to process just how far her pathborn anathema was. The phantasmic failed—affected by the distorted patterns of Continuum. The Regular unleashed a barrage of counterfire from all corners of the room. The noise became deafening. The thousands of projectiles poured into Uthred at once—the chronology of Draus Manifold Paracosmos ensuring they were delivered through every junction at the same time.
Reflective shells folded around Vator, Shotin, and Mondelles—the overwhelming force and heat passing through the room vented through these effigies of gleaming glass and sparing the people cocooned inside.
Yet, despite delivering enough ordinance to glass a mundane district, Draus’ firepower proved futile. Her matter-based projectiles decayed before they could ever hit Uthred, and her beams diffracted, splitting into parting streams. The Deliverer arrived in an instant, its enormous rusted arm clawing to smear everyone within the office—only to be countered by the glass-formed palm of the Simulacra.
Rather than a collision, however, Draus let the Deliverer’s fist pass through her reflective palm—opened a junction connected to the glass casing that held Mondelles. The anathema’s fist, a few dozen meters large, exploded out from the shell around the Acting Authority and severed itself down its elbow. Rust and decay flooded the room. Broken chassis and mangled corpses poured out as the tapestry smeared into near incoherence.
Relative distance and time became as if a slurry within Mondelles’ office. Uthred remained incapacitated. Shotin, Vator, Mondelles, and Chambers didn’t have enough speed to react. Only Draus and her pathborn self mattered then, and they leveled their cannons and fired at each other concurrently.
The space within Mondelles office could only be separated along two thresholds. The first was that which burned: a rupture in the Continuum of all things, reality’s pages peeling apart from Uthred’s flame. Through the gaps approached the Deliverer, her mangled head-cannon instilled with destruction and decay launching a flechette that promised absolute destruction.
Islands of reflections and scintillating glass defied the flames of paracausality, and beyond them loomed a realm of tessellated fractals. Draus plucked Shotin, Mondelles, and Vator through their reflections and directed them toward the innermost layer of her demiplane where time moved at a near halt. Then, her Arsenalist’s spinal cannon emerged from her body, and she fired a counter-shot at the Deliverer’s flechette.
The flames danced. Glass flashed.
A projectile of crushing annihilation left the flame just as a golden round passed through a golden reflection. They collided thereafter—and the flechette shattered Draus’ Redaction Bullet. Absolute destruction reaped its due. The flechette continued forth.
For another meter or so. Then it suddenly vanished as well, chronology claiming its revenge.
Draus shattered every reflection in the office with a thought as she dueled her alternative self across the incoherent sea of paracausality. Waves of static embers clenched and pulled at geometry. Unleashed attacks went missing, only to return a few seconds later. And in the midst of it all, a cavalry charge of Simulcrae stormed forth, their centaur-like forms emerging from reflection after reflection, sprouting gun-made wings from their backs as they engaged the Deliverer en masse.
REND CAPACITY [SIMULACRA RESPLENDENT] - 17%
REND CAPACITY [ARESENALIST] - 3%
Neither time nor metaphysics was on her side.
Draus was more powerful than ever, but the Deliverer was still an enemy sporting a higher Spherage. With Uthred freed from Chambers’ Bonds, things were on the ledge of fucked to hopeless if she didn’t turn this around and fast.
Which was why she scooped the others into her inner threshold in the first place.
Because it wasn’t just the perfect firing spot for her Arsenalist, but a sanctuary to do some strategy in the heat of combat. Just a damn shame the Deliverer was so fucking fast. She seemed utterly unaffected by Draus’ Canon of Chronology. The way the patterns of speed bled from her ontology, it was like the Deliverer had a fixed speed it would move at no matter what the situation was.
Which also explained why the Deliverer wasn’t too fast for her to react to, either. It moved a bit faster than her always, but that was all. A bit. A permanent relative.
She could handle that. Just needed to conduct some stalling action.
Cross-crossing exchanges of gunfire consumed the chaotic space. Draus did the bulk of the shooting, letting her Arsenalist’s Rend climb fast so she would have a Redaction Round ready every time the Deliverer fired its head-cannon at her. The Regular used her Simulacrae as firing platforms rather than charging horsemen. Those the Deliverer approached, she abandoned, detonating them with a Shattershunt. In the aftermath, she simply spawned more, using her ability to exist through multiple reflections at once to harass the Deliverer despite the pathborn’s superior speed.
+Fuck, I’m an annoyin’ sow to kill,+ the Deliverer projected, thoughtcast echoing through the expanse with a stuttering reveberation.
+Feelin’s fucking mutual,+ Draus sent back.
And while she fought, something else came to her attention: Uthred’s embers were seeping into her demiplane, reaching into her—and she couldn’t stop his miracles at all.
Fucking continuum. Fucking paracasuality. Fucking Avo. She should’ve known his bullshit thaumaturgy would’ve come back to shoot her in the cunt. Right. Perfect. The fact that she felt new ontological presences forming from the embers was just salt on the wound. Uthred was practically a backdoor for Veylis into Axtraxis. The half-strand had been left here as a trap. And she stumbled right into him without a chance of predicting any of this.
Well. Nothing for it. Time to see what she and the others could pull out of their asses before they got their heads pulled out through their asses.
As the bulk of Draus focused on fighting, she risked a single precious moment to send a message to Chambers—and nearly paid for when the Deliverer came within a hair’s distance from shooting an ontology-shattering flechette into one of her Simulacrae.
{Chambers!} Draus roared, firing a Redaction Round to deny her pathborn self victory. {You’re in charge inside. Get done backlashin’, then figure out how we fuck these fuckers to death.]
***
—[Chambers]—
“No! I can’t—I can’t feel him! Where—Where!” The Lovebringer resembled a burning yearn doll. The backlash consumed rushed across every last bond it possessed and a gush of flames blasted out from its hollow chest and the folds it had for a head, but still, it was more disheartened at losing touch with Uthred than anything else.
Chambers on the other hand was busy trying to regain his senses because—holy fuck did Uthred bust hard. That half-strand was so uptight and pent-up that when he came, it was like rust sprocket breaking after twenty years of holding back a dam’s worth of water. It was enough to make a man cry. Shit, Chambers was crying, and he could hear Cas and Marlowe talking to him back where his body was.
But he was getting better.
That was a hell of a lot of pleasure, but he managed to hold onto himself. For Draus’ sake. Because he still had a run to finish. Even if he wanted to continue making himself feel good. Feel good.
Fuck. Just because he got one over on his shitty evil self didn’t make this any easier.
And neither did the next part.
{Chambers! You’re in charge inside. Get done backlashin’, then figure out how we fuck these fuckers to death.}
Chambers was about to ask her how he was going to get back in with his Bonds broken, but he found his answer along a single burning thread—a frayed but strong rope that connected him to Shotin. That held on even now. That. And the link between him and Draus, him and Cas, him and Marlowe…
“They can kick us in the teeth, they can pour molten metal down our ass, but they can’t make us soft, can they, Aedon?” the Lovebringer said, letting out a soft chuckle. There, within that place between places, in that messy conflux of love, Chambers watched as his backlash began to subside alongside his unbalanced urges.
+A-fucking-men, consang. Let’s go. The Reg needs us.+
Grasping Shotin’s Bond, Chambers manifested his Heaven across an impossible stretch of space—arriving within a demiplane composed of glass-like fractals, open portals, and distant—the fuck, why was Draus’ paracoma-whatever burning? There looked to be three thin barriers that made up this entire place, and the outermost wall was practically gone. Entire fleets composed of the Arsenalist’s guns retreated from the outermost threshold for the plane, and Chambers felt a jolt as something happened to chronology.
Frankly, he couldn’t tell if things outside were going really slow or things where he was at was going really fast.
“Oh, dear,” the Lovebringer muttered. “This isn’t good.”
Looking down, Chambers took in the others. Mondelles, Shotin, and Vator looked disoriented and startled. The Seeker, in particular, was on the verge of manifesting his Planeshift. Inside of Draus.
+Shotin! Nononono, waitwaitwaitwait!+
Desperate, Chambers tugged on his bond and Shotin tumbled through the weighless expanse that was Draus’ inner world. Fearing a violent response, Chambers injected Shotin with a dose of love, and instead of catching a stack on the head, Shotin tumbled through the air with open arms—embrace the Lovebringer as if a love-struck insect clinging to a tower-sized doll made from countless stitches.
“Chambers! Consang! Fuck me, am I glad to see you!” Shotin breathed out as he pressed his face into Chambers’ Heaven. The Seeker’s gaze turned coquetttished. He sneakily undid a button on his chest.
+Fuck,+ Chambers thought. +It worked too good.+
“It worked just right,” the Lovebringer replied. “He deserves a lot of love right now. For his pain to heal.”
As Shotin began rubbing himself against the Lovebringer, Chambers cleared his throat and spoke using the Heaven. “Well, uh, Draus says I’m in charge now, so, uh, like, don’t freak out or some shit, okay.”
Mondelles blinked. Vator, however, squinted his eyes. “Aedon Chambers? Is that you?”
Oh, gods, of the two that responded to him first, it was the creepy Greatling kid that liked cutting people up. “Uh, yeah. You gotta problem with that?”
“Hardly! I’m simply surprised! You! You have a Heaven of Love now?” Vator threw his head back and barked a pitched laugh. “How… ridiculous. I reviewed your cog-dossier, Subject Chambers. I know your hobbies and browsing habits. It seems that New Vultun will soon find itself suffering for a particular subset of extreme masochistic fetishes.”
“Look—it’s just—fucking! Doesn’t matter right now! Draus needs are help!”
Shotin’s face was muffled against Chambers and he offered a mangled reply. “Don’t care about her, but I do like you…”
Jaus. He wasn’t a leader. But—but he needed to be. For Draus. For Avo. Oh, fuckfuckfuck, shitshitshit, uhhhh…
“Okay. First. Uh. The—the Rendsink outside! What’s its domain! You! Stubbles! Acting Authority guy.”
Mondelles hesitated for a moment longer before shaking himself loose and replying. “War. Domain of War. It’s a representative mantle piece. It shouldn’t be filled by—”
“Yeah, yeah, okay; shit,” Chambers sighed. “Was kinda hoping for Space or something. That usually destablishes shit. Gives you an opening.”
Can… change it… Ignorance’s voice intruded. You have…. Stillborn.
And just as fast as Avo’s Definement was, he wasn’t again. But the effect was achieved. Chambers was divinely inspired.
“Wait! No! I can work with it! Okay! Okay. Uh… You!” Chambers said, pointed a thread at Vator. “We’re going to need to fuck up your dad again. I think his mind almost cracked when I touched him—maybe… maybe I just need to make him come again. Even harder this time. Shit. Wait. Do you Guilders have that—the fuck’s it called? A refractory period?”
The young Greatling’s typically sunny expression flinched as something akin to disgust flashed across his face. “I… Aedon Chambers, I must commend you. I… no one has ever made me feel this genuinely uncomfortable before. No have I ever expected to discuss my father’s refractory period with someone that is trying to drive him insane via hypercharged orgasms.” A beat followed. A broken wing made of guns tumbled in the distance, vanishing into the invading fires. “I… we could exploit his more obvious mental weakness. I would much prefer that.”
{Chambers!} Draus sent. {Runnin’ out capacity out here! Hurry the fuck up!}
Shitshitshitshitshit—
“What other weakness?” Chambers asked, anxiety sounding in his voice.
“Why, he’s shame at failing Abrel, myself, Jhred, mother… I think he would likely fall to insanity entirely if he was forced to watch my siblings die over and over again. If that can be engineered, somehow…” Vator hummed.
That was when Chambers had an idea. An idea only a half-strand could have. An idea only an Enforcer who was tempered from the cruelties of the Crucibles could come up with. “Then… that means he won’t attack your siblings either…”
“I suspect… I am not entirely certain.” Vator shrugged. “My father’s mental state is very questionable right now. This is the first time I’ve seen him cry, to be honest. Though, if you need me to participate in this session of combat, I must decline. I have taken a vow of nonviolence on behalf of my Heaven. I will not harm another.”
“What?”
“A vow of—”
“I know. What the fuck! Are you fucking shitting me?”
A flesh-flap thing rose out from Vator’s skin—which was mega-fucking gross, and it screamed at Chambers. “Cease your pressuring of my host. He has sworn his honor to me. We will be disgraced no further by any of you.”
Chambers flinched. “Right. Fuck’s sake—I… uh…” Okay. The pieces were kind of coming together. Uthred—they could get Uthred. Maybe. He just needed to do something that—
Fuck! Shit! Mirrorhead was snuffed before Chambers was a Clad. “Argh! Fuck! How am I to make the Greatling meatshield now?”
“The what?” Shotin said, lifting his head. There was a hope in his voice. A vicious desire.
“The what?” Vator asked, frown betraying a hint of worry.
“Look—the idea is simple. We—well, someone who can create like, Abrel and Mirrorhead—Jhred’s—sheaths pumps out a few hundred of them, I—I like, control them with my mind and make them scream things like ‘agh, no daddy, why are you hurting me’ and shit. And we make a bunch of them. And then we wrap them around the Rendsink that I’ll have to turn in a Rendbomb a room over. Then we hit Uthred with it.”
Absolute silence. Other than the sound of Draus’ demiplane burning. Most of the second layer was gone too.
{Chambers!} Draus growled. It sounded bad on her end. Real bad.
“Chambers,” Shotin whispered. “That plan… is fucking nova.”
“It is?”
“It’s very disturbing. You’re a very disturbing person, Aedon Chambers.” Vator didn’t seem so amused when speaking to Chambers anymore. “The vicarities had more of an effect on you than I expected, this is…” He drew in a breath. “Very well. I have conferred with my Heaven. Growing brain-dead versions of my siblings to serve as a psychological attack against my father is acceptable in accordance with my new ethics.”
Through it all, Mondelles did his best expression of a goldfish in a water tank. “I… I can move people and things around. Using… light. Tunnel into things with my Heaven.”
“Awesome. You grab Shotin. Shotin… Fucking drop your stacks when I tell you.” Chambers’ mind was racing, his nerves were shot.
Fuckfuckfuck, pleaseJausplease…
{Draus,} Chambers said, as he tried to figure out how he was going to bullshit his way into success this time. {I think I have… concepts of a plan.}
{...Well, we all have to die sometime.} The Regular sighed. {Fuckin… go for it.}
