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Thresholder, ch 140, Wag the Dog
🕑 Added 2024-08-13 09:46:35 +0000 UTCHey, it's a chapter!
I think I'm done with that particular bout of depression, at least so far as I understand my mental state. Got pretty bad there, not going to lie. Now it's just a matter of getting back to full productivity, which ... I think got damaged in the fight. A lot of the unexpected mental health break was just finding dopamine when and where I could, and a lot of that was in attention-destroying places. I feel like I coded some subroutines into myself that weren't there before, an instinct for cheap hits when what I should be doing is the long, rewarding act of creation.
But it's hard to say, I guess. I'm still not entirely sure what the root cause of the depression spiral was, but probably some combination of stress, anxiety, and just generally having a brain that's not terribly good at any of that sort of thing.
I cannot promise that the chapters will be flowing like wine. In fact, there's a chance this should have been two chapters, since it's almost 8K words, and 4K words is the unofficial chapter length. Part of what I've been trying to do is not be stressed out about writing in particular, because that's a terrible thing to be stressed about, and also an easy thing to be stressed about, especially when I've got this internal sense of time that's very very aware of how many days it's been since the last chapter was posted.
Thank you for bearing with me during this difficult time, and let's hope that the difficult time is actually over so I can get back on track. I would really love to have some author's notes that are about hiking in the woods or making root beer instead of depression posting.
(Also, sorry for the radio silence, I find needing to publicly explain that my brain is bad and I do not have promised work available to be extremely stressful, especially if it needs to be done repeatedly, and stressing out about that just makes everything worse, but also this is part of a complex of maladaptive behaviors when it comes to my depression.)
~~~~
The prognostics couldn’t see what Third Fervor was doing, but as with Fenilor, the Farfinder wasn’t quite blind to the effect she was having on the world.
The prognostics would show the fair set up to celebrate the revolution in Berus, and then a relatively small portion of the view would black out, announcing Third Fervor’s arrival. People would run screaming from the void in the view, and when the cloud of imperceptibility lifted, the scene of glad-handing symoulion representatives and workers would be replaced by devastation, torn bodies and screaming bystanders.
“It’s retaliation,” said Perry. “It has to be.”
“Or they’re playing a deeper game,” said Mette.
“Or it’s a different sort of probing,” said Hella. She had her arms crossed. The meeting was in the bridge, an emergency affair, only a single version of each of them, the primes. “But if you don’t respond, she might escalate into an all-out war.”
“Decapitating leadership doesn’t actually work well against the symboulions,” said Perry. “In theory, at least. And especially not if they have clones ready to go, which in fairness, they probably don’t.”
“Leadership still means something,” said Mette. “As much as they might pretend that they’re a community of people who are all on the same level, they’re not fungible. There aren’t that many people who have the knowledge and experience to keep Berus on the right path. They’re never going back to monarchy, I wouldn’t think, but …”
“I’m stopping her either way,” said Perry. “I’m not even sure her motivations matter. She’s killing innocents, whether that’s on Fenilor’s orders or the queen’s.”
“Fine,” said Hella. “I wouldn’t feel right about standing back while it happened, but … you understand the prognostics aren’t great?”
“I won’t have a lot of insight into the potential fight,” said Perry with a nod. “I won’t necessarily know whether I’ve won or lost.”
“No,” said Hella. “I mean earlier.”
“Earlier?” asked Perry, frowning.
“Third Fervor’s plan to attack? That was a sudden change. It shouldn’t have happened like that. We should have caught some glimpse of it long before it happened. What we caught instead was like that,” she snapped, “going from the event not appearing in any timeline to the event appearing in every timeline. Let’s say that she’s attacking on Fenilor’s orders, which is entirely possible. If Fenilor were giving the orders, then that should have shown up in prognostics too. If it was ‘fated’, then it should have been a part of the assured future. It should have been seen. But it came suddenly. Which probably means that Fenilor decided to put something in motion based on what he saw of us. The reason we didn’t see it coming was because of a change we made, except that we didn’t make changes.” They couldn’t see the impact of their own actions, and had to park the ship out away from things if they wanted to take a reading of the future.
“You think he’s aware of the ship?” asked Perry. “That he’s aware we’re watching the future?”
“I think so, yes,” said Hella. “I don’t think he can possibly have all the information, but I think he’s been watching. We haven’t seen him watching. Which is a problem.”
“Then we don’t use the doors anymore,” said Perry. “Not where there’s a chance he can spy on us. If he enters this ship … I can’t guarantee that the battle will leave things intact.” He thought about that some more. “I can’t guarantee that I will win.”
“Noted,” said Hella. “We’ll do atmospheric transfers only then.”
“I’m going down now,” said Perry. “I’d prefer prognostics to staying in touch. Interrupt only if it’s looking like I’m going to lose, or if you can sway the win percent.”
“We’ll be blind,” said Mette. “Not sure what you think you’re going to get out of us.”
“Not much,” said Perry. “I’m going to try to win on my own.” He hesitated. “I want to stash the queen clone here.”
“We’re not a prison ship,” said Hella.
“I need the shelf space to be cleared,” said Perry. “I need it combat ready.”
“Fine,” said Hella with an exasperated sigh. “But we’re not a prison ship. As soon as it’s feasible to drop her off somewhere, we’ll do that, but I’m worried you said too much to her.”
“Nothing they didn’t already figure out on their own,” said Perry. He turned to Mette. “One of you will be in charge of her. Try to get some information.”
“Can do,” said Mette.
Perry turned back to Hella. “Do we know when Fenilor used the cloning machine? Or where? There can’t be that many of them.”
“They’re difficult to track down,” said Eggletina. She’d only been paying half attention to the meeting, too wrapped up in something on a tablet. “And it’s very possible that we’re missing one.”
“Missing one?” asked Perry. “One that’s hidden away in one of the blank spots?”
“Uh, no,” said Eggy. “You know how we can’t get at you when you’re in your shelf?”
“He might have one too,” said Perry as realization dawned. “Or not exactly the same, but something like it.”
“Right,” said Eggy. “Very possible that he’s got somewhere to hide, or somewhere to put things.”
“That would be bad,” said Perry. “Maybe extremely bad.”
“Yup,” said Eggy. “Just a theory, at the moment, because we haven’t found anything in the books about it, and he hasn’t said anything about it.”
“He’ll be watching this fight,” said Perry. “Is it a small enough area that you can scan for anomalies?”
“‘Anomalies’,” laughed Eggy. “You’re vastly overestimating our capabilities here. We can turn all the error messages on, but it’s magic slop that we only barely managed to direct into computers in the first place.”
“I’ll try my hand at it,” said Mette. “But she’s right. Fixing all the problems aboard this ship is taking a lot of time, and trying to find aberrations of an unknown nature will be difficult, and especially difficult on this planet.” Mette had complained before that there were too many magics here. The stuff they had to learn would have filled dozens of textbooks, and the interactions would have filled a dozen more.
“Fine,” said Perry. “Do your best. I’m dumping the false queen and going down there.”
“Now?” asked Hella. “It’s early morning. The attack won’t be for hours.”
“Better to run prognostics with me out there. Account for my actions,” said Perry. “Besides, I want to get the lay of the land. If you have anything for me, beam it to Marchand.”
“We’ve actually been using exclusively what you refer to as email,” said Eggy. She put her hands on her hips.
“It’s been a bit of a problem,” said Mette, looking a bit apologetic. Whatever their difficulties, it had seemed fine to Perry, but he wasn’t the one having to implement half a hundred hacky solutions to major problems.
Perry nodded, then looked at Hella. “Show me the room to dump the fake queen.”
“We’re done here?” asked Hella.
Perry nodded, and that seemed to be that.
The queen was extracted from the shelf and was quite sullen about it, though she couldn’t help but look around wildly at the bedroom that Hella had crafted for her. Hella wasn’t happy about having another prisoner, but the queen was much less dangerous than Nima had ever been, and there was absolutely no way she was getting out. They would have to have a conversation about the terms and conditions of her imprisonment, but depositing her out in the wider world seemed like a non-starter. There was also a possibility that they could use her in some way; only Third Fervor knew that she was a clone, her kingdom was ignorant of that fact.
But Perry didn’t stick around to see how that would shake out. He went down to Berus, to wait for an attack he was still faintly hoping wasn’t coming.
~~~~
He had hoped that they could cancel the event somehow. There were probably machinations at play within the symboulions, and the cancellation of an event that was meant to show the strength and promise of the new not-a-country would show exactly the opposite if the celebration was suddenly stopped due to vague warnings.
Perry didn’t entirely begrudge them that. He was pretty sure that many other organizations and governments would have done the same. There was a shark in the water, but the mayor wanted the beach open for the tourists, it was a tale at least as old as the 1970s. At best, there would be some warnings issued, with people told to watch out for anything suspicious, but Third Fervor had only ever intervened in person once, and that had been very brief, handled by Perry.
He stood on top of the city’s largest building, watching over the festivities. He’d been there for hours, since the early morning, and had watched the setup. There was no sign that Third Fervor had given anyone advance warning, though there were still counter-revolutionaries within Berus, and some of them were operating with ill intent, even if there was no clear replacement for their murdered king, no heir to rally behind.
But no, Perry was worried about Third Fervor and her alone.
He understood her, he thought. She was a monarchist, she had a monarch, and even if it wasn’t the monarch she might have wanted, she would follow orders, particularly when they pushed the agenda of monarchy forward. He didn’t fully understand why she was doing this though, except perhaps if the queen had ordered it, and he didn’t understand why the queen would do that. If Perry had been king, he would have been seeking to normalize relations, not to antagonize.
Perry watched as the crowd began to grow. There were booths set up with little events, and there was free food and free drinks, which were bound to bring people in. Maybe there wouldn’t have been such good attendance if the kitchens had all been up and running, but food had not been in as much abundance as the symboulions would have liked. This was another way for them to put their best foot forward and show that they were getting everything on the right path. They would get things figured out, if only through the sheer force of will of the global community sending multiple ships their way.
Perry kept a close eye on the targets. The prognostics had shown the people that Third Fervor went after, though she was inconsistent about it. Some of the symboulion members were wearing lavender armbands to identify themselves, which had made the targeting vastly easier for her. Perry’s ability to pick people out of a crowd, at least while wearing the armor, vastly exceeded Third Fervor’s. With the Farfinder watching, Perry could easily have gotten a dossier on virtually any person in the crowd, and there had been enough of a nanite listener network left behind that he could probably have had Marchand grab hours of conversation from any of the important ones.
There was a part of him that wished he could be down there with them. He wanted to see the culture in action, and this was culture-building stuff, a celebration that would be unique to this specific island, even if it was taken from blueprints brought from across the ocean. They were writing the script as they went, and the lavender armbands would be etched into tradition. He had often wondered about that — the first Thanksgiving, the first Independence Day, a nation trying to find its footing and forcing a tradition into being through force of will.
It was all going to be interrupted imminently.
The prognostics reports got sent in every time they reset the mechanism. There was nothing all that helpful. The frequency of the reports got faster and faster as the time approached. Third Fervor was apparently very regular, striking when the clock struck seven (their system of timekeeping did not match Earth’s: it was midday). That seemed to indicate that it was an agreed-upon signal, because there was no other reason for her to choose that time specifically. It was consistent, which meant something.
As the time approached, the prognostics reports stopped coming. They were probably trying to see the future after the fight, though it was difficult to say.
Perry made sure he was ready and positioned. He was going to drop in and go after her, and there was going to be a fight, and it was possible he was going to win. The prognostics seemed to be on his side. Still, he was more nervous than he’d been for a fight in quite some time. Maybe it was that he knew it was coming, that it had a specific time, or maybe it was that he still felt like he was missing a piece of the puzzle.
When the portal appeared, Perry was already moving, and he was far too late to stop the first of the deaths. Third Fervor was moving with full force, slicing through people with her spear, not seeming to care whether they had the lavender armband on or not. Perry came in with his own spear and hit her in the back, sending her sprawling until she fell through a portal, but by then a dozen people were already dead.
Third Fervor screamed loud enough to kill people without protection. She had a portal open next to her, touched with her armored fingers, and it winked rapidly as she changed its target destination, which moved all around the square. Her eyes were on Perry, not on the people she was killing. The sound of the note she was holding was loud enough that people fell to the ground clutching their heads, and many of them weren’t getting up.
Perry raced for her. The shoulder-gun fired rhythmically, not as fast as it could go, but with steady, measured, targeted shots that nevertheless failed to penetrate. She somehow had more resolve while committing the atrocity — that, or whatever spell Fenilor had cast on her was ongoing.
Perry was expecting her to move as he rushed her, to open a portal beneath her feet and put him out of range, but she leaned forward and increased the volume loud enough that it was shaking his teeth and disrupting the rhythm of his heart, to say nothing of the stabbing pain in his ears. He crashed into her, and they tumbled through a portal together, high above the city, grappling with each other. The shoulder-gun fired again as they picked up speed, striking her in the helmet and causing her head to jerk back, but it left only a small dent.
Spears were a terrible weapon for grappling in freefall, and Third Fervor held hers uselessly, its sharp point coming nowhere near him. Perry choked up on his spear, using it like a knife with an incredibly long handle, and tried to stab her in the side with it, but Fenilor’s spear was no match for Third Fervor’s impeccable armor.
The shouting had stopped, at least, but Third Fervor was trying to find a latch on his armor, some way into it, which wouldn’t happen unless something had gone wrong with the mechanisms.
Perry had virtually no experience with wrestling, whether in free fall or not, but he tried to twist Third Fervor around, to grab her arm so he could wrench it into a hold. His hope was that it would work even with her armor on, but it would depend on how the joints had been designed, and whether they would allow him to simply snap her arm because there was no protection to keep the joints from going the wrong way.
Eventually he had one of her arms, and began twisting it, but she placed a hand behind him as they fell and another portal opened up. They fell through it, then another portal, moving them out over the ocean, which wasn’t ideal. If she was intent on killing more people down in Berus, all she would have to do was give him the slip, which was why he was holding onto her.
If she was in pain from having her arm twisted the wrong way, she wasn’t showing it, but Perry didn’t have the best hold on her, and was having to invent the principles of an arm bar on the fly. He had spun around to be upside down relative to her, and his spear was left whipping in the wind, held there by a long tether attached hours before. Without it, he would be down to the sword, much less maneuverable, but that had been anchored in place on his back given that he didn’t think he’d have any combat use for it.
Third Fervor did something with the portals that made Perry’s stomach lurch. He was surprised when they landed hard on worked stone, their velocity having apparently been canceled by a portal that had thrown them up into the air. He put his full effort into breaking her arm, but her armor was stopping him from accomplishing much damage, though she was flopping around like a fish and in pain.
The room she’d put them in was full of barrels, most of them with a thick black substance around the rims and sides. They had been hastily packed with something, placed in this room by the dozen. It was possible they had moved to Thirlwell during the freefall, though they seemed to be in a storeroom of some kind, one with a window big enough that Third Fervor could portal out. There was more of the black substance on the ground, a grit that they were rolling around in. She could portal them out at any time, but she had chosen to place them here.
With an extra expenditure of effort, the Wolf Vessel halfway opened to give a surge of power, Perry heard the crack of something in her hyperextended shoulder. She screamed in pain, not amplified, and Perry rotated her arm, trying to use jagged bone to cut through tendon and muscle.
A torch was thrown into room from the open window. Perry watched as it twirled through the air, helpless to stop it. It landed among the thin layer of black grit they were fighting in, which went up in a flash of smoke and fire, but just after that the fire reached the barrels, and those exploded with full force.
When Perry came to, the suit of armor was dead. He was bleeding and in pain all over, but he pushed energy outside of himself, to the armor, trying to get it back to a state where it could boot. He was surprised that he could feel the connections between the pieces, the unseating of wires, the way that it had been damaged. Perry was pretty sure he had internal bleeding, and while the display was dead, his hands went to take the helmet off. It was supposed to come away cleanly in the case of power failure, but something had been damaged or was stuck, and without the power armor aiding him, he felt sluggish. There was something on top of him that didn’t move when he tried to shove it aside. He didn’t try more than once.
The armor powered back on before Perry could get the helmet off. He stared at the screen as Marchand finished booting up.
The storeroom they’d been in had the roof blown off it. The walls were down, rock strewn everywhere, and for a moment Perry wasn’t even sure that he was in the same place. She’d taken him to a place with explosives, stacked barrels of gunpowder or something else, then blown them both up. Either she’d meant to leave him there and portal out, or hoped that her armor was better than his.
A heavy timber was laying across him, part of the roof, he was pretty sure. With the armor working again, he was able to move it, and as soon as he did, pain flooded his lower body. Marchand had a variety of red alerts at the bottom of the HUD, and some of them were medical: while Perry had been passed out, the suit was filling with blood, and inside his body was like a stewed tomato swimming in a can of its own juices.
He was surprised to see Third Fervor slumped up against one wall. Her armor was still encasing her, but she was bleeding from it, and not moving. It didn’t look like she was slumped there, it looked like she’d been bodily thrown by the explosion.
Perry wasted no time and turned into the mechawolf.
When injured, the process was slightly slower, but Perry had prepared for this fight, and he had plenty of power in his vessel to work with. He healed as he transformed, both the flesh and the metal parts of him, and once he was done, he was back to full power. He bit her head as soon as he was able to, feeling hard metal against his long teeth. His claws couldn’t gouge her either — even unconscious, the armor worked, and he let out a growl of frustration.
If she was dead, he would need to leave with her body. He wanted no chance that the portal would open up anywhere Fenilor would be able to get at it. But if she was alive, he wanted to kill her, because she was too dangerous to be left alive.
He went sniffing for her spear, and found it broken on the ground, snapped so that only a foot of handle was attached to the head. Perry picked this up in his teeth, being ginger with it, then hefted himself onto Third Fervor, pressing the tip of the wickedly sharp spear into her chest. It caught on the metal, then screamed loudly against the armor as he pushed the obsidian tip through. He could barely see, even with the cameras studded around his body, but as soon as it was through the metal it became easier. The hole widened with every inch. Even broken, the spear still held some of its magic.
Third Fervor woke then, that one extra source of pain rousing her. She pushed away at him feebly, then harder, but still not strong enough to get him off of her. Her plan had failed, and her arm was still broken and torn up, leaving her with only her right hand to push against him. She tried to grip the spear’s head, and Perry heard the keening as it dug through her armored hands.
When she came to her senses, she reached down to touch the ground below her, and Perry released the spear. He bit her around the leg at the last possible moment, stilling her before she could fall through the portal, holding her back. He was too large to go through even if she could have managed some way to trick him, so she was stuck with him. He bit down hard on her, hoping that his teeth would make their way through her armor, or that it would bend, but it held fast, and she beat him with her one good fist about the nose even as he held her above a portal that led high into the air.
He hoped that somewhere in there, beneath the skin of metal, she was dying.
When she grabbed for the spearhead, apparently to stab him, he yanked her to the side, still holding her leg firm. She cried out in pain and frustration, and he whipped her back and forth, hoping to break more inside her, shaking her like a ragdoll.
She opened portal after portal, each one at a place she touched, sometimes in the air. He had a skewed view of people, their purposes unclear, until finally she stuck a portal in the air that showed five men on the other side. They had crude weapons raised, firearms as made by people who had discovered firearms in the very recent past and had no tradition of it. They were similar to the weapons that had been used at the execution, but longer and more narrow.
“Fire!” called Third Fervor.
They likely would have shot without her asking to. They had the stink of fear on them, even through the portal. They had been waiting all day for this.
The bullets hit Perry, but only one of the shots was clean. It hit Perry in a camera, taking it out, while the other bullets glanced off the armor in different directions. The damage left him with a wound, but it wasn’t a serious one. He felt the urge to charge forward and tear through them, which would be the work of only a few seconds, but he wasn’t a mere animal, and he had the wherewithal to use the other tools at his disposal. The shoulder gun lifted up from its housing and fired five rapid shots, aiming squarely at center mass. They each went down, and the portal shut before the kills could be confirmed.
Perry turned to Third Fervor.
She had grown, and as he looked at her, she was growing larger. Already she was nearly ten feet tall, too large for him to easily get his mouth around her leg again. The growth was accelerating, and she was getting bigger still. Her armor grew with her, not just expanding but gaining details that hadn’t been there before.
When she shouted, it was louder than it had ever been before, and Perry whimpered as the echoes bounced back from the hills around them.
She kept growing. She became a giant, then a titan. It was one of her powers they had only limited information on; it wouldn’t last forever, and she would be weakened afterward. They had seen it in prognostics only once or twice, and never in much detail. It had been responsible for Perry’s death in those predicted timelines, a last resort used to great effect.
Aboard the Farfinder, they had been calling it Big Mode, and Perry had no great plan for dealing with it. He grabbed the broken spear from the floor in his mouth and held it there. From what he could see, the armor had not gotten thicker, it had only spread out, and if it was just as impenetrable as before, that still meant the broken magical spear could cut through it with some effort. Of course, the rules of Big Mode, at least as far as they were known, meant that he would only have to wait her out, and if they had wound up in Thirlwell, there was no longer any threat to the people of Berus. Perry could simply run, and with her that size — now grown to nearly thirty feet tall — there was no way she could use her portals.
Third Fervor immediately opened a portal.
It was huge, the size of a swimming pool, thick and wide, the magic interplaying with Big Mode. She stumbled back into it, and Perry bounded after her, slipping through just before she snapped it shut. She portaled again, and Perry went for her ankle, hoping to hold on and not be lost. Getting bigger hadn’t fully healed her, and had possibly not healed her at all, because her wounded arm was still being held limply at her side, and she was staggering, only barely aware of herself.
She portaled again, and this time Perry had less trouble following her, though they were high in the sky, a giantess and a wolf. She portaled again, then again, moving them out over the water, until a final portal sent them crashing down against the ground, far less controlled than last time. Third Fervor hit a building, and Perry rolled across cobblestones, his tethered spear dragging behind him, the broken spear still in his mouth.
She had brought them back to Berus again, where the dead were laying on the ground, unmoved, and the streets had been cleared. People were hiding out, and a tent which had held caramels was being used to triage wounds.
She kicked at Perry and he backed away from her, then bent down and opened up the shelf space.
The laser gun that Brigitta had made was waiting there — had been waiting the entire time, connected to a bank of batteries. The wireless connection was made immediately, and the system had been meant to be controlled by Marchand, except that now Perry was also Marchand. He could feel the protocols and see through the small camera that had been left in the shelf space, could line up the shot properly with small servos, and fired at Third Fervor’s center.
At first there was no response from her. She was only sluggishly getting to her feet as she pushed up from the caved-in side of a tailor’s. But while the laser wasn’t penetrating the armor, it was heating it up to white-hot. She soon began screaming, slapping at the hot metal, and when that didn’t work, she raced forward to Perry, giant hand coming down to slap him as her other arm hung uselessly.
Perry dodge to the side, dropping the shelf space opening, which stopped the laser, but after he’d bounded back away from her, he opened it back up again. The laser gun was stuck onto some servos scavenged from the Farfinder, and Perry was fully in control of it, firing it through the aperture again. With his enhanced mechanical vision, he could see the thick beam as it went through the air, and if he could keep it up, he could burn her alive in the armor, nevermind that it couldn’t be penetrated.
Another portal snapped open, and a wall of water blasted out of it.
Perry winked the shelf space shut, then was tossed by the wave, slammed against a brick building that groaned with the wave of water pressing against it. Third Fervor had flooded the city in just an instant, salt water from the deep sea washing away the tent where people had been getting medical treatment, turning the thoroughfares into rivers of mud with tumbling cobblestones, bodies, and personal effects.
Perry lifted up into the air, held aloft by the sword that ran along his back. The spear still dangled from the tether, and his mouth was still tight around the other spear, but he had no hope of driving it into her with enough leverage, even if her armor was just as thin as it had been when she was small. It clung to her, seeming skintight, the ultimate defense.
Perry landed on a rooftop and tried to assess. It was hard, as the wolf, and even as the mechawolf. He wanted to kill her, to rip into her with his claws and teeth, but ineffectually biting at magically-hardened metal would do nothing. He fired the laser at her again, from an unstable rooftop this time, and managed to keep it there for quite a while until she charged at him. He aimed for the head, hoping to cook her brain.
At thirty feet tall, she crashed into the building. She was moving faster than she had been before. Whatever damage the gunpowder plot had done to her, she was shaking it off, though her arm was still fucked, and she was fighting one-handed.
She screamed again, deafeningly loud, blowing out a handful of microphones, and Perry winced.
Third Fervor noticed this time.
She screamed again, louder, deeper, rumbling the bones in his body, breaking windows with the noise, and assuredly injuring more of the fleeing civilians. She advanced on him with another sharp blast of sound, and he ran along the rooftops, leaping from eave to eave. He felt like he should have been faster than her, but she had none of the weight a woman her size should have had — or possibly, the speed and strength to make up for it.
The chase was causing immense destruction through the flooded city. Third Fervor cared nothing for the civilians, their homes and businesses, and when she swatted at Perry, it was with full force. Her fists broke through support beams and cracked foundations, and Perry kept running, trying to keep away from her. Eventually she would run down, and then she would be vulnerable. If he kept the tip of the spear in his mouth, he would have a weapon to defeat her, if the laser gun wasn’t enough.
As he was about to make another leap from roof to roof, Third Fervor screamed again, and Perry faltered. He missed the jump and crashed through a window instead, finding himself in a workshop where looms had already gone still. Third Fervor tore the wall open at the window, parting the brickwork, and Perry ran forward as the roof began to collapse. He leapt from another window, crashing through, and landed on the city street in a foot of water.
Third Fervor appeared in front of him with a portal that was wide enough to stretch from one side of the street to the other. She stomped down on him with a heel that could easily have impaled him, and he rolled to the side, then darted ahead. She screamed after him, but he was having trouble hearing it anymore, leaving the sound only as something that rattled his teeth and vibrated his metal plates.
He could smell death on her as he passed. She was doing terribly beneath the armor, as huge and imposing as she looked. The hole he’d made in her chest with the tip of the spear was still there, and still bleeding. If he could land a shot there with his gun, he might be able to end her, though she had more flesh than before, and a bullet would seem like a BB.
He was trying to make a plan when the spear he’d been dragging behind him his whole time caught on something. He strained against it, then bit through the material with razor sharp teeth, but it was enough of a delay for Third Fervor to appear with a portal and slap him down the street.
Perry’s body broke in a dozen places, bones snapping and metal shearing, with the softer, more delicate bits — muscle and wire — cut straight through. He bounced once on the cobblestone street, then hit the side of a wall, and seized up as the bad news came in, both intense pain from the biological parts of him and coldly clinical damage assessments from the mechanical. It would knit itself together, all of it, but Third Fervor stepped through another portal and was on him.
Perry opened his shelf space and used his one good paw to push himself into it, letting it close before Third Fervor’s questing hand could find him.
He lay in the shelf, panting hard. She hadn’t opened a portal to come in with him, and probably couldn’t at that size.
He was healing, regenerating, and his store of energy was depleting in the process. He’d gone into the fight topped up with some full exposure to the moon, but without moonlight, he was depending on the reactor, which had already knitted itself back together once. It wasn’t enough energy. Another hit like that, and he might have to transform back, if he survived it at all.
Still, there were people out there, people who he’d said he was trying to save, and if he let Third Fervor get away, she could recover in peace. He still had no idea why she was even doing this, why she’d been commanded to do this.
He got to his feet slowly. He was still injured, but the bones had brought themselves back together again.
If she left, she would go lick her wounds. She would shrink back down to size, and they wouldn’t be able to find her, and then she would be able to do it all over again.
Perry opened the shelf and raced out on legs that were still getting back to full strength. He needed her to know that he was still there, still alive.
She slammed down a fist he only saw because his body was studded with so many cameras, and he dodged to the side, narrowly avoiding her thumb. She was moving slower now, her wounds taking their toll. She had been racing after him, moving fast, and even if Big Mode wasn’t at its end, she was flagging.
Perry ran, still healing as he did so. He needed her to keep up the chase, and also needed to stay close enough to her that he could dive through a portal when she did. If she escaped, he would never catch her, but he was fast in this form, even as he drained energy from his vessels to keep up the speed.
Third Fervor appeared in front of him and tried to stop him to death. He dodged to the side as her heel buried itself two feet deep in the road. While she extracted her foot, he opened the shelf space and fired on her again, lasing her back and howling at her, trying to keep her attention.
He didn’t know when she would back out, and wanted to be ready for it.
She turned to him, laser scoring a mark along her back, and screamed so loud that the laser’s mounting was knocked over. Perry rattled from the sound, and went completely deaf this time, brought to his knees by a sound so loud it made his heart flutter.
She went at him with every ounce of speed she had left in her, using her one good hand in a desperate attempt to smash him flat. He raced backward, dropping the shelf space again, and she screamed after him as she slapped the cobblestones, cracking them. He turned back when she didn’t follow him, and he bounded forward, barking at her, when she stepped back. A portal opened behind her, but she was too slow for him.
He dug his claws into her leg, gripping her in a way that was awkward for a wolf’s form, and they went back together, to a clearing near a forest that must have been somewhere in Thirlwell. She tried to shake him off, and when that didn’t work, she beat at him with her fists, which broke a bone in his shoulder and forced him to slump to the ground. But when she opened a portal beneath her feet, he doggedly jumped after her, and they fell together through three more portals, high in the air, one of them nearly closing right behind him.
She was getting smaller and weaker. The portals were shrinking with every one she made.
She used a portal to fling them high and kill their momentum, and Perry was able to use a blast of moonlight, aimed backward, to propel him just close enough to get her ankle in his mouth. She punched him again, but he held on tight, and the punch was weaker, because she was smaller.
More portals went by. Perry hit the side of one, and it was like hitting concrete, but he held firm. She was trying to shake him, to get him off of her, and if she did, then it was all over.
They landed together in a stretch of sand, somewhere unknown to Perry. He wasn’t sure how many portals they had gone through, or what her plan was, but she was back down to her normal size, and she was still fighting against him, but she was using only her own reduced strength, which was nothing to him. She might as well have been petting him for all the good it was doing her.
Perry released her ankle and moved on her. She was laying on the ground, in the sand, staining it with the blood that leaked from her armor.
He raised the shoulder gun out of its casing, calculated the precise angle, then shot her twice through the hole he’d made in her armor. She jerked with the impact and let out a low groan, then went still.
Perry stared down at her, waiting, then gripped her in his mouth and flung her body into the shelf space, following after her. He was useless without hands, but it would have been best to manacle her to something heavy. He was going to try to find a way to remove her armor, but as he watched, it fell from her like skin sloughing off, the vibrant color of it fading away and becoming insubstantial. Beneath it, she was broken and bloodied.
Perry sat for a moment, pacing back and forth, then checked his energy levels. His vessels had been depleted with the damage she’d done in that last fall, and while he’d healed back, there was little left. If this was part of Fenilor’s plan, then Perry didn’t have the power left for a second fight.
He transformed back, feeling every inch of the pain and awkwardness of metal and flesh unmerging from each other.
When he was finished, he went to look at Third Fervor. She hadn’t moved at all. She was dead, he could smell the death on her already, and when he’d been the wolf he’d been close enough to hear her heartbeat still. Beneath the armor, she was just flesh. She had all kinds of wounds on her body, all from him, different attacks she’d suffered and never quite healed back from.
“March,” said Perry.
“Yes, sir?” asked Marchand.
“I guess … now we wait,” said Perry.
“Certainly, sir,” said Marchand.
“The portal is going to open,” said Perry. “Or it should, unless this was a clone.”
“I doubt that it could have been a clone, sir,” said Marchand. “She had her powers.”
Perry used a toe to turn the body over, and saw a small tablet covered in the same crusty material as the one they’d found in Fenilor’s murder basement. Perry left it where it was. He doubted that it did more than conceal her location.
Was this what Fenilor wanted? Had Perry played into his hands?
“Why did she do it?” asked Perry. It was a nothing question. It wasn’t even really important.
“Because she was told to, sir,” Marchand answered.
Perry sat with the body and waited. He had no idea where in the world they were. If he stepped out though, Fenilor might find him, and if the portal opened then, there would need to be a fight. The reactor was slowly charging Perry’s vessels back up, but the fight with Fenilor would be more difficult.
He would need to go retrieve the spear from wherever it had been left in Berus, if someone hadn’t stolen it. Even if they had stolen it, he would have to find a way to get it back.
Perry slowly removed his armor. He had been in it for what felt like a long time. He watched the corpse, waiting to see whether it would move, but Third Fervor was dead. He took his sword and stabbed her once through the eye, down into the brain, just to be sure, but she didn’t move or cry out.
When the portal opened, it was understated. Perry stared at it.
There was a temptation to go through, obviously. He could leave this life behind, as he’d left others behind. In fact, the Farfinder could follow. They would probably see his exit on the punch map, if that worked with this small pocket dimension. And because they had Nima and Mette, it would mean that Fenilor could never win his fight. Maybe he would get another matchup in a few years time, or maybe the cycle would be broken. They didn’t actually know.
Perry sat on the bed, one of the only pieces of furniture that remained in the shelf space. It had been taken from a library, and Perry had the good grace to feel a little guilty about that. It wasn’t as much as he wanted to take through to the next world.
From what they knew, the portal would stick around for about a day. He just needed to wait it out, and if he did, it would disappear. He could catch the next one, the one that would open when Fenilor was killed. That was the plan.
Still, there was a part of him that felt drawn to the portal.
“I’m going to break the tablet and pop out,” said Perry after an hour had passed with the portal simply hovering there. “Enough that the Farfinder should be able to see us. Not enough that Fenilor should be able to find us. And I’m going up high. It should be more difficult for him to find us that way.”
“Sir, is that wise?” asked Marchand. “If we simply wait Fenilor out, it seems we are on much better footing. An avenue for his escape will be closed.”
“I’m hoping the risk is low,” said Perry. He reached down and picked up the tablet, which had been laying on the ground, and snapped it in half. He could practically feel the magic draining out of it.
He did put the armor back on before going outside, just in case.
When he stepped out into the desert, he only intended to be there long enough for the Farfinder to get a message of confirmation to him. They had his signature and would pinpoint him within minutes, no matter where in the world he was, and with prognostics, it was possible for them to pinpoint him even before he stepped out.
But as the minutes went by, Perry started to feel a churn in his stomach. They would have seen everything from a remove, the aftermath of the fight rather than the fight itself, a dark sphere in their sensors. They would have known from the eyewitnesses that it had been going right — that he wasn’t dead. And even if they thought he was dead, they would have kept searching for him, it would have cost them almost nothing.
“Why’s it taking so long?” asked Perry.
“I don’t know, sir,” said Marchand.
Perry rose up into the air, leaving the ground behind. He needed to get his bearings, and if he wanted to go to Berus in any reasonable amount of time, that meant going up to space where he could get some proper acceleration. Besides, it meant less of a chance for Fenilor to approach. Fenilor obviously had some bullshit left, he hadn’t used all his tools he’d gathered yet, but going up high reduced the possibility space of that bullshit.
Perry was halfway into the climb when an email notification came in. There was only one possibility of where it could have come from: the Farfinder had found him.
But he stopped as soon as he read the subject line. It said only “HELP!!!!”
Comments
Lorenzo
Typo: "Third Fervor appeared in front of him and tried to stop him to death. " Stop -> Stomp
Leaf
Fenilor really is a narcissist. He really will kill the multiverse’s best hope of stopping the grand spell just to win a fight.
Luan Levandoski
Happy to hear you are doing better
chicken
it's so plausible that i refuse to believe anything else
Marc
Fenilor was the clone princess all along
Jack Smith
Aaaaaaaw shiiiiiit, next chapters gonna be good
John Harper
Glad to hear you're feeling better. Take as long as you need.
iridium248
Next: Fenilor kills the entire cast of Star Trek.
