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Thresholder, ch 147, Rebound
🕑 Added 2024-12-31 21:49:38 +0000 UTCFor whatever reason, this chapter was hell to write. I am really hoping that the next few chapters are not.
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They tested first, before using the device. They weren’t idiots. The only argument against it was that they didn’t necessarily have the resources to do it twice if something blew the first time — the building they had pushed to full power was burning immense amounts of fuel, and was shielded from the effluence as much as it could be, but could possibly weaken itself and fail.
So the device, which they were still calling the “wiggler”, was turned in the direction of an old woman who had stepped through the portal. The screens showing the shape of the skin of the universe were different now, not a sheet pulled over a bed of nails, but a warped geometric shape that was different on three screens, an attempt to show a higher-dimensional reality. Perry had no idea how to read it, and in practice, one of the Mettes had to offer interpretation most of the time. It was more accurate to whatever was going on in higher dimensions.
“We don’t know where she’s going to come out,” said Mette Prime. “We have, really, very little control here. This might just splatter her against the ground. Are we fine with doing that to a random little old lady?”
“It should be a portal, right?” asked Perry. “I mean … it’s a portal in, it’s a portal out, right?”
“We have no idea,” said Mette Prime. “We’re interfering with things that we only barely understand. There’s a chance that this blows up the world.”
“A low chance,” said Eggy 6. “I mean, a chance based on our calculations being wrong, not a calculated chance.”
“Probably it’s a portal,” said Mette Prime. “But maybe she’ll just appear. And probably she’ll appear where the portal originally was, but … also maybe somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else is underselling it,” said Henrietta. “This is an Aleph-class universe. We’re on one planet around one star. The distances are so enormous that she might end up somewhere we could never have a single hope of detecting her, most of them extremely deadly. Much more likely that than a splat.”
“That’s assuming that we don’t get the signal,” said Mette Prime. “A signal precedes the portal, which would at least give us a clue about where she is. We’re set up to track that, at least.”
“What are the odds we’re just killing someone?” asked Perry. “Some random innocent?”
“I don’t know,” said Mette Prime.
There was some silence in the room following that.
“Any one of these people would have given their life,” said Dirk. “That’s what they thought they were doing, going into that portal.”
“No,” said Perry. “They thought they were going to fight, to have their injuries and infirmities repaired. They thought they had a chance. They thought they were in control of their fate. That they had some agency.”
“Look,” said Dirk, running his fingers through his hair. “You’re not part of the culture, you don’t understand how it is, how we treat things, and every conversation I’ve had with you, I understand you better. You put yourself first. We don’t do that.”
“If I put myself first, I’d have been out of here,” said Perry. “I wouldn’t be waiting around with a ticking clock and my thumb up my ass.”
“I’m making the call,” said Dirk. “We’re doing it. We’re trying to snag her back. If she dies, she dies.”
“You don’t have the authority to make the call,” said Hella. “You’re not the project lead here, and you’re not captain of this ship.” She looked at Mette Prime. “It can be your call or mine, and I’m inclined to think that it’s mine, unless you veto. I’ve had blood on my hands before.”
Mette Prime laughed. “You think I haven’t had blood on my hands?”
So they went ahead with it. It was the work of many screens and output parameters that Perry had no particular knowledge of. For the test, he was placed far away from the Farfinder. This was mostly in case she came through into the shelf space and created some kind of calamity. It would be better to keep it confined to somewhere far away, where only Perry would be at risk. He wasn’t even wearing the ring, it was carefully set down a mile away from him, where he could easily retrieve it if it didn’t explode on them for whatever reason.
If it did explode, it wasn’t clear what they would do then, but exploding Fenilor seemed like it might be among the best outcomes.
The test went ahead. There were no explosions. They didn’t immediately have eyes on the woman, though their scanning algorithms were looking for her, so Perry flew over, picked up the ring, then opened the shelf space. She was standing there, looking confused.
“Did it not work?” she asked. She seemed crestfallen.
“It worked,” Perry told her. “We’re on the path to victory.”
~~~~
The shelf space was converted into a killbox. The only major consideration was that they didn’t want to destroy the shelf, which meant hurriedly putting up backstops for the various weapons. Heavy guns were a given, and when they were finished, it looked almost comical to Perry, like some kind of Wile E. Coyote trap.
They still weren’t sure that it would kill Fenilor, so the shelf had also been flooded with a variety of toxic gasses, enough that when Perry went in there he needed time in decontamination after coming back out. They were racing through these preparations as fast as they could, putting teams on different approaches, and the hope was that Fenilor would be dead as a doornail the moment he stepped through.
Still, Perry was feeling some anxiety. He’d analyzed every glimpse of Fenilor’s armory he’d gotten. There were still tricks left in there, and while the options were limited — especially if Perry assumed that nothing was being held back when it could have won a fight — there were still known unknowns. He’d watched over every fight they’d had, trying to run them back, and even did some digital training with Marchand, drilling as much as he could.
It would, technically, be possible to simply strand Fenilor in the shelf space, but that might lead to its destruction, and they didn’t know what would happen after that. No, if the shelf space didn’t kill Fenilor within the first half hour, it was unlikely to ever kill him, and he would have to be taken out.
They had plans for that too, though it would depend on what state Fenilor emerged in and how much damage he could take.
The impetus for keeping the shelf space was that with it, they could bring almost anything through, weaving whatever magic was inside it into the next world that Perry visited. It was a crucial piece of the puzzle if they were going to make a multiversal trade network happen. The Farfinder had been limited to whatever systems were in place, but with the shelf, Perry could bring along a piece of their engine, or the heart of their surveillance system, or anything else that might be vital in the next world.
All it was going to take was killing Fenilor.
Perry did his best to keep his heart from beating too fast.
There was a good chance Fenilor would die seconds after he came through the portal. The danger would be past either way, with him back in this world and no particular portal out. The only path for Fenilor would be to kill both Mette and Nima, and it wasn’t actually certain that would create a portal either. If the portal spat Fenilor back out, then maybe another thresholder would be summoned for him, but that wasn’t guaranteed either.
“Status update?” asked Perry.
The response was slow to come. “We’re still prepping,” said a Mette. “Hold tight.”
Perry clenched his teeth for just a moment before relaxing his muscles. There was a chance that he had enough power in his jaw now to crack a molar.
What was it with engineers and poor estimations of how long something would take? Perry wasn’t sure there was any other profession where people so routinely got their deadlines so fucked. Maybe it was simply that he’d been sitting on the sidelines, watching what they were doing but unable to help.
And now the time was near, and he was moments from needing his sword.
Probably, anyway.
“We’re a go,” said Mette. “Estimate is ten seconds from this message.”
They were on a slight delay. Marchand put up a counter in the corner of Perry’s vision. The seconds seemed to crawl by.
Then the countdown hit zero and went negative, and then the timer was counting up.
“Clean on our end,” said Mette.
“March will keep you informed,” said Perry.
He waited five minutes. That was what they had agreed on. It was enough time for all their weapons to fire, for Fenilor to bleed out, for Fenilor to inhale the noxious mixture, for Fenilor to die.
There was something inherently cowardly about it, trying to kill a man this way, but Perry had failed at single combat, and if Fenilor was let loose back into this world, it was anyone’s guess what would happen. Perhaps Fenilor would murder everyone on the Farfinder, or turn the machinery of the culture to his own purposes, or kill projects he had no stomach for in the cradle. None of that would be as bad as blowing up the world, but the multiversal trade network and potential alliance was also hanging in the balance.
“Do you think he’s dead?” asked Perry after four minutes and forty-five seconds.
“The agreed protocol was five minutes, sir,” said Marchand. “Though I do admit that my own analysis is that this number was pulled from a hat.”
“Yeah,” said Perry. He could wait longer — was, in fact, waiting longer, as the timer went past five minutes. “But if he’s not dead, then we don’t want to give him time to regenerate or prepare.”
“Which we’re doing now, sir,” said Marchand. The timer pulsed red.
Perry opened a small connection to the shelf space for exactly three seconds, timed by Marchand, then snapped it shut again.
“Data review,” said Perry, pointlessly, because Marchand was already doing it.
They didn’t have a way to transfer information out of the shelf space when it was closed, but they had studded the interior with cameras and sensors, along with a heavy dusting of nanites. Marchand was using all of it to get a reconstruction of what had happened five minutes ago.
The portal had appeared, Fenilor had stepped out, and he’d immediately been shot from six different directions. He’d moved fast, since he’d gone through the portal on guard, but he’d been hit hard, once in the shoulder and the other time in the leg. Fenilor had been in the same ceramic shard armor he’d been in before — no time at all had passed from Fenilor’s perspective — and it had simply exploded outward from the force of the heavy guns. Fenilor had lost his right arm and most of that shoulder, and yet he raced forward across the floor of the shelf space, one leg flopping slightly, finding a place out of the line of fire even as the auto-targeting systems attempted to track him. The shot to the leg seemed like more of a glancing blow.
Fenilor took in a deep breath as he switched armors, and immediately began coughing, which stopped as soon as the armor swapped into place around him.
He had transformed, and was now made of some kind of goop, with a simple breastplate around him. His right arm was still gone. The separated piece of it lay on the floor, with shards of ceramic around it, their binding energy completely dispersed, but a good portion of the arm had been vaporized or spread around in smaller chunks.
Fenilor had time to take stock of his situation. He hadn’t immediately died. He was a slime now, the vague shape of a one-armed man in a breastplate. If the slime form respired, it wasn’t showing it, which meant that the toxins were lingering uselessly in the air.
“Fuck,” said Perry. “Skip ahead.”
Fenilor went to the guns, taking advantage of their blind spots, and disabled them one by one with the stroke of a sword made of razor-thin brass. Then he sat, waiting, at the entrance to the shelf space. Most of the five minutes had been that, the waiting, sword in hand.
“Double fuck,” said Perry.
“How long shall we give it, sir?” asked Marchand. “At some point, he’ll attempt to break free from the impromptu prison.”
The plan was to go immediately, to fight to the death and hopefully win this time. The circumstances were different, better, but the contingencies that followed Fenilor living would depend on how he lived. This wasn’t the worst case scenario, where Fenilor came out without a scratch. That Fenilor hadn’t switched from the goo form was promising, since it was an active defense that deprived him of others. The only question was whether it was better to pull him out or fight inside the shelf. Marchand was fully sealed up, and oxygen wouldn’t be a problem on the timescales a fight would last for.
“Two stage fight,” said Perry. “We fight inside, where he’ll have to keep his mouth shut, then we move the fight outside if we can’t end things. That’s the plan.”
“Very good sir,” replied Marchand.
Perry opened the shelf space just a wink, a hole large enough to see through, and nearly got blasted in the face with one of the guns. Fenilor had taken it from its mounting and turned it around, aiming it straight at the door, and it was only through superior reflexes that Perry was able to turn to the side and avoid the oversized bullet.
Perry slipped inside, and the modified gun clicked again, out of ammo. Fenilor cast it aside, summoned a weapon, and their blades met.
Fenilor’s longsword wasn’t one that Perry had seen before, but it was clearly drawing something from the air. Particulates clung to it, the toxins and poisons, and they were building up slowly even as Perry watched. No doubt it would be a terrible hit to take, but if its purpose was purifying the air, then it likely wasn’t sharp enough to cut through metal.
Perry was on the offensive. From Fenilor’s perspective he had just finished their fight and was rolling straight into the next one with five minutes between them, missing an arm and coughing on poison, which meant there was never going to be a more perfect moment.
Perry’s sword cut cleanly through the goo, barely slowing down, but the wound resealed afterward, like a knife through soup. Perry blocked a thrust toward his chest, then attacked again, hitting the armor this time. He was rewarded with a deep gouge in the metal, and brought his sword down a second time, hammering with all the fury he felt, putting every ounce of power into his sword arm.
When Fenilor tried to sneak a hit in, Perry simply grabbed the sword by its hilt. His hand went through Fenilor’s oozing pseudopod, so their limbs were overlapping, but Perry was far, far stronger, at least against an ooze.
Fenilor’s pseudopod slipped away from the sword and snaked out to the side as the armor he was wearing took hit after hit, dents and gouges that were threatening to rip the breastplate apart. When the pseudopod was far enough away, the ghostly array of weapons appeared, and before Fenilor could select one, Perry punched forward, splashing the ooze and temporarily removing the arm. The ghostly armory disappeared, and Perry dropped both swords to the ground, reaching forward to stick his fingers into a hole he’d gouged into Fenilor’s armor. The breastplate twisted and ripped as Perry put his full effort into widening the hole, and at a critical moment it split in two, all structural integrity lost.
Perry had been hoping that Fenilor would be killed outright by the loss of the armor, but he just transformed back into an elf, one that was naked on the floor, bleeding from one shoulder and with an arm that looked slightly deformed. The leg that had taken the hit was violently red on the inner thigh. Fenilor took an involuntary breath, coughed once, then was in another armor, this one the skintight number he’d been wearing when he attacked the Farfinder. The sleeve of the right arm flopped loosely.
Perry was on the attack, and got kicked in the chest for it. It did no damage, but it was enough for Fenilor to push himself away, and he got to his feet with a little half-flip, ending with a small amount of space between them. Fenilor’s back was to an earthen embankment they’d set up to catch bullets.
The shoulder-gun rose and fired two of what Perry had started to think of as courtesy rounds, probing shots to test that the armor was actually bullet-proof.
This time, the courtesy shot to the chest was rewarded with a spray of blood as Fenilor doubled over. He switched armors in an instant, grabbing the next one with no seeming thought, and this one was another that Perry had seen before, down in the mine, jagged and triangular, with overlapping plates. The pieces that would have covered the left arm simply fell to the ground and lay there, unmoving.
A new weapon appeared in Fenilor’s left hand, which seemed to be a flail without the stick. The head was as large as a soccer ball, and Fenilor whipped it around at speed, striking Perry squarely in the chest, sending him backward. Perry was ready for the flail head to come at him again, but when he’d regained his bearings, he realized that Fenilor had a different target: he was attacking the wall of the shelf space.
Perry raced forward and stopped the weapon before it could make a second strike against the wall, but significant damage had been done already. Beyond the walls of the shelf space, it was anyone’s guess, but the risk of the whole thing collapsing was very real. Whether that would throw them out or explode the interior was something Perry was going to try to avoid finding out.
Fenilor spun the ball around his head again, moving away from the wall he’d been smashing, leaving Perry to chase. Fenilor was slower, and working with only one hand and a slight limp, but he was smashing the walls with the kind of vigor a man missing an arm shouldn’t have had. With every step that Fenilor took, more blood was splashing down onto the ground. He swung the shaftless flail around again, smashing repeatedly into the walls, forcing Perry to race forward and tackle him.
They grappled on the ground, then Fenilor pushed Perry away with a burst of strength, and before Perry could get back in, the armor changed again. The courtesy shots were fired quickly, and passed through the emerald green plate armor with wisps of smoke. Perry’s sword did the same, and then Fenilor was back to smashing at the walls with the flail, making deeper and deeper craters with every swing of the heavy head.
Perry tried to grab at Fenilor, but his hands simply went straight through, so the only option left was to grab the chain of the flail — or whatever weapon it actually was — and pull. That briefly put them into a tug-of-war, with Perry the stronger of the two, and he managed to bring Fenilor through the wreckage of the guns. They were close to the entrance of the shelf space, and Perry had a decision to make, which didn’t take all that much deciding. Fenilor was injured and maybe dying, but he could probably destroy the shelf space before that happened.
Perry positioned himself at the entrance to the shelf space, then opened it up.
Fenilor surprised him by sprinting straight through, passing entirely through Perry on his way out. He’d let go of the chain they’d been fighting over, and Perry stumbled for a moment, then followed right after Fenilor.
Perry had positioned himself carefully before the plan went through. They had gone through the options, weighing the pros and cons of each, and so when the wiggler was activated, Perry was wearing the ring on the moon.
Fenilor was on his knees, gasping noiselessly, and Perry advanced on him, raising his sword for another strike. Fenilor switched armors, back to the skintight one with the bubble helmet, and Marchand fired the shoulder gun again without asking, putting another bullet hole in it. Blood sprayed up, falling in slow motion under the reduced gravity, and Perry’s sword came down. The armor was swapped again at the last second to something thick and bulbous, deflecting the strike, and Fenilor rolled to the side. His right sleeve was still empty and flopping uselessly, but he climbed to his feet, and got yet another weapon from his storage, this one an oversized sword that would have been impossible to wield one-handed if they hadn’t been under lunar gravity.
Perry had chosen the moon for a few reasons. The lack of atmosphere was one of them, because it limited which armors Fenilor could wear. The moonlight was another — it was bathing him, providing a constant influx of energy.
He bounded forward and slipped beneath the huge swing of the mighty sword. He was still half-hoping that somewhere beneath the armor, Fenilor was dying of various poisons, but the fight was still going on.
Perry aimed for the helmet using the pommel of his sword, and it simply bonked off, sending Fenilor away. The sword touched down against the ground just once, and Fenilor spun up into the air, landing deftly on his feet. He held the sword out behind him, prepared for a strike. Perry didn’t want to oblige, but Fenilor’s abilities were still largely unknown.
Perry had spent the past six hours practicing lunar combat. He leapt forward, letting his momentum carry him. In his imagination, lunar combat would be in slow motion, but that was just the influence of the Apollo missions. The low gravity only slowed down the speed of a fall, nothing else, and the lack of air meant there was less drag. Perry’s sword let him hit the ground again at speed, faster than falling, which meant that lunar combat was quick and frenetic, at least in theory.
Fenilor swung the sword around as Perry came in, and their swords met for just a moment, enough for the full force of the heavy blade to send Perry off his angle. He landed on the ground and rushed back, meeting another sword strike with his feet better planted this time. He felt servos whine as he tried to keep his place, but Fenilor — one-handed — was bringing an incredible amount of power to bear.
Perry slipped below the blade, which noiselessly passed over his head, and kicked Fenilor squarely between the legs.
This wasn’t a move to hurt him, it was only meant to launch him. Under the moon’s reduced gravity, a fall lasted much longer, and with the planted power that Perry had put behind him, Fenilor would be in the air for a while.
It was clear that Perry needed more power, but thankfully, more power was in orbit.
“Call in the strike,” said Perry.
A red reticle instantly appeared on the lunar surface, a giant UI element overlaying the regolith. It seemed smaller now that they were actually fighting each other, no larger than the width of a minivan. A timer appeared as part of Perry’s HUD, but it was approximate. The shell wouldn’t have actually been fired yet, and the reticle was also just a guess until it was in transit.
Perry got beneath Fenilor as he fell, and their swords clashed again, with Perry using his footing to push Fenilor upward again. The locking of their blades strained Perry’s legs and the metal of the power armor, but with Fenilor in the air, every swipe of the sword required conservation of angular momentum. Fenilor couldn’t swing the huge blade without also spinning himself.
They played what Perry could only describe as keepy-uppies for three consecutive clashes. The HUD had updated with a correct time, and the targeting reticle was nailed in place as part of augmented reality. He had a time and a place, he only had to maneuver Fenilor there.
It was almost predictable that Fenilor would change armors at just the wrong moment.
The heavy armor was replaced by something nimble and light, almost gossamer. The iridescent patterns changed around the chest in a way that suggested a bra, and suggested that it might have once been meant for a woman. Whatever diaphanous material it was made from, there was something like wings coming from the back of it, and even without air, it let Fenilor glide. He landed like a moth on the ground, where he switched armors again. The bullets fired at him had either missed or done nothing.
This time it was just a breastplate, but the moment it was in place, bits of the moon came up to surround him. The gun fired three times as he moved, hitting twice, once in the leg. The body beneath the armor was heavily wounded, dripping blood, but it was all covered in white rock before Perry could get close enough to strike. The missing arm was replaced by rock as well, an animate limb formed from chunks of regolith. No sign of Fenilor remained, not even his face, which had been covered first.
Fenilor was thirty feet from the reticle. There were forty-five seconds left.
Perry went for it, though he was doubtful of his ability to move that much rock. The huge sword, which hadn’t been swapped out, swung around to meet him, but he slipped beneath it by forcing himself low to the ground, and then let himself be pushed aside by the arm of rock when it came around to him. Perry went at Fenilor again, trying to kick him, and Fenilor moved out of the way, the lumbering rock around him moving at frightening speed. It was thick enough that there was no way that a sword could penetrate it, but it was also made of spare rocks that had been mashed together, which meant that maybe a sword could simply slip through.
Perry tried twice, and Fenilor brought the huge sword up to block, using it more like a shield. With a flick of the wrist, Fenilor struck Perry in the chest, and without a wind up, it merely sent Perry backward.
Twenty seconds remained on the counter.
It wasn’t clear how Fenilor was seeing with his eyes covered. Perry used the sword to lift himself up from the ground, more on a hunch than anything else — the armor was made of stone, so the better not to touch stone.
Fenilor responded by firing off the rocks. They left his body all at once, zooming away in all directions, and Perry brought his arm up to protect his face, then charged forward even as Marchand was cataloging minor damage.
He struck Fenilor just as more rocks were rising up to cover the elf’s body, and pushed him backward. In the lunar gravity, it took him some time to find his footing, and when he was back in a fighting stance, he was still ten feet away from where the reticle was now flashing.
Perry ran forward again, keeping low to the ground, forced down by the sword. He was running at nearly a crouch, and closed the distance in an instant.
Overhead, the shell was now visible to Marchand’s cameras and being tracked in red.
Perry lifted off the ground at the last moment, hoping that Fenilor would be blind to him, then landed half a foot before they collided. He got beneath the rock armor and heaved with all his might, succeeding only because of the lunar gravity. Fenilor hit him across the back in the process, the first full hit from the massive sword, and Perry was pushed down into the ground.
When he got up, Fenilor was standing almost directly on the reticle. There were five seconds left, and Perry closed in, throwing his sword at Fenilor, making himself a target, anything to keep him in one spot. He took a hit to his arm that nearly severed it, but it kept Fenilor engaged.
When the timer reached one second, Perry zoomed backward, flying after the sword.
The impact would have been deafening if there had been an atmosphere, but there was only a brief, understated flash of light. The slug of metal was large, but it had no explosives in it, only tiny thrusters on the sides to correct its trajectory.
When Perry turned back to see whether it had worked, the various pieces of Fenilor had not yet hit the ground.
“Damage assessment,” said Perry.
“You or him, sir?” asked Marchand.
Perry paused. He’d meant Fenilor, but Fenilor had been ripped apart. There was still the possibility of one last trick, a bit of some extra spell hidden away, but with every passing second it seemed less likely. Maybe there was a phylactery somewhere, who could really say for certain, but Perry slowly dropped his guard.
“I wasn’t being droll, sir,” said Marchand. “I really was unclear on whether you meant for him or for us.”
There was pain across Perry’s back and in his left arm, which had been badly damaged in the final seconds. “Damage assessment for us,” said Perry.
Marchand listed off the issues, but they were on the moon, and it wouldn’t take Perry long to collect lunar energy. Already minor repairs were being made by the outflow of power, though a part of Perry still wondered whether he should be refilling his depleted reserves instead.
It hadn’t been a fair fight, not even remotely. Fenilor had been severely injured, poisoned, then placed in an environment without air, limiting which armors he could use.
The win felt hollow.
“Shall I proceed to a damage assessment of Fenilor?” asked Marchand.
“He’s dead,” said Perry.
“Quite, sir,” said Marchand.
“Only,” Perry began.
But just as he said it, a portal appeared in front of him, not more than three feet away. He watched it closely for a moment. That was final confirmation.
“I’ve communicated our circumstances to the Farfinder,” said Marchand. “Shall I assume we’re shortly to make our exit from this world?”
“We need to restock the shelf,” said Perry. “We need to clean it out too.” His voice didn’t sound quite right.
“You seem perturbed, sir,” said Marchand.
“I killed a man,” said Perry. “Or an elf, I guess. Give me a moment.” He tightened his lips and looked out at the carnage. The portal hung there. It was in an annoying spot.
A long silence followed. An icon showed that there was an incoming communication from Mette, and he ignored it.
It wasn’t the killing that had gotten Perry, it was the character of it. Perry had lost against Fenilor, and he’d had almost no influence on whether the rematch would happen. His life had been at risk, there was a good possibility that he could have lost the rematch somehow, depending on the precise nature of the bag of tricks Fenilor was using … but it hadn’t been fair. Why was it important that it was fair? The day had been saved, the world had been won. It was a victory.
“I suppose it’s ironic, sir,” said Marchand.
“What is?” asked Perry.
“It was the culture he helped create that defeated him,” said Marchand. “We would never have been able to stop him without them. He defected, and was punished for it. From what we know of thresholders, this might have been the first time a fight was ever won because the people of that world decided it would be so.”
“Maybe,” said Perry.
“I apologize for my philosophical musings, sir,” said Marchand.
“No,” said Perry. “It’s fine. You knew what I was thinking?”
“I had a vague intuition, sir,” said Marchand. “Though I cannot say that anything I’ve said to you might actually help your mindset.”
“Not really, no,” said Perry. “Teamwork shouldn’t feel this … bad.”
He hadn’t even gotten the killing blow, that had been from the Farfinder.
“We’re being hailed again, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve been giving noncommittal answers, but it would be better to communicate your plans.”
“Right,” said Perry. He kept looking at the portal. “Whatever is going on in my brain, we have a team now. We have partners. I’ll work on my own shit later.”
“I’m sure you will, sir,” said Marchand. “Shall I put Mette through?”
Perry nodded. She, at least, was excited that everything had gone according to plan.
Comments
iridium248
Honestly, I feel this was kind of a lame way for Fenilor to die - He didn't even get to say anything! Ah, well: A win is a win, I guess.
Max Alexander Michalik
Thank you for the chapter. You said you were bothered by writing pure fight scenes lately. Maybe this dragging out of a foregone conclusion (to you) made it extra hard to write? Still, from my side of things it was a very enjoyable read, even if I didn't have any surprises other than the detail that they were suddenly on the Moon (at which point I was sure that the floor would be wiped with Felinor so hard that he wouldn't even get final words in.
Kevin Vermeer
> No, if the shelf space didn’t kill Fenilor within the first half hour, it was unlikely to ever kill him, and he would have to be taken out. But where should he be taken out? The ring could be anywhere, I don't expect Perry to be holding both the ring and the idiot ball, doing this in the lounge on the Farfinder. They get to choose the location of the fight. I'm leaning towards just using the sword and it's physics-breaking constant acceleration capacity (and Perry's lack of time pressure) to go out into deep space, accelerating to a very high velocity on a collision course with the star - or on an escape trajectory, either works. Guaranteed victory if he doesn't have transportation, but both would leave the portal in a bad place. > ... Perry was wearing the ring on the moon. What a reveal! Brilliant! On another note: > For whatever reason, this chapter was hell to write. I am really hoping that the next few chapters are not. I'm deeply familiar with the feeling. Or at least I have my own flavor of it - I'm grateful to be a computer engineer and not a psychologist, computers are easy in comparison to brains...but I still have to do psychology on myself. Another creator I follow on Patreon just published a great short video addressing some of the same things that you and I are struggling with here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVxg3TMtk0M Momentum is really hard to develop and maintain in creative endeavors like yours and mine (and Joe's), where sometimes I'm not making progress because I just haven't had that lightbulb moment that's really progress, and sometimes I'm not making progress because I'm procrastinating. Here's hoping that you and me both get a little better at this in the new year!
Leaf
Sorry to hear that this chapter was such a fight. But you came out of it looking like a champion. Unlike Perry who had to tag team it.
Marc
So does Perry’s disatisfaction lead him to introspect and abandon his Thresholder ways, or does he realize the Algorithm knew he had allies and gave him an opponent he couldn’t defeat without them - and that the solution is to abandon them outright before they get in the way of even more potentially satisfying fights?
Clarity Amaranthine
Hell has paid off, this chapter reads GREAT and is such a satisfying payoff to this arc. This story is so fucking cool. Thank you for putting in the work & happy new year!!
Lorenzo
I think it should be made more clear that the portal was redirected to going back to the universe they're currently in. At least, that's what I assumed what's happened, given that the universe didn't explode.
Lorenzo
Eyyy, excellent new chapter!
