Chapter 902 – The loss of the Gestalts
Three days later, John strolled through what had once been the centre of operations of the West Gestalt. It was an empty husk, a Protected Space that would soon collapse on its own due to the lack of maintenance to keep it up. Silence was as dominating there as it had been in every other barrier they had visited.
By the time Fusion’s forces had pacified the entirety of the East Gestalt and saved the last few survivors, the western guild had already been gnawed clean. John was the vanguard of the operations and he found nothing but the remaining shells. Some Lorylim spores still hung around some areas but, for the most part, the first foe had retreated.
In a little more than a week, the Lorylim had appeared, corrupted several thousand people, and evacuated them somewhere else. The speed was worrying, but the unique circumstances led the Gamer to believe that things went tremendously faster than they normally would have. As was already established, the Gestalt practice was fertile soil for a corrupting outside force.
What exactly the Lorylim had done with those infested humans was a question John didn’t have an answer to. Whether they had been converted into meat for Lorylim to use for the manifestations or kept as corrupted hosts that could still manoeuvre in the mundane world, John didn’t know. The latter had many more worrying implications.
“How do I stop the Lorylim?” John mumbled, as he walked through the corridors. They had an absolutely incoherent design to them. Individual after individual had added their personal flair to the surroundings, each one being replaced as per the West Gestalt scheme of having an interchanging origin of memory sharing. One would expect the design to grow more unified with time. Instead, it seemed to grow more confused. Mixing minds muddled into design choices that were internally as incoherent as they were between the contestants.
“You fucker better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking,” Eliza growled behind him.
“Depends on what you think I’m thinking,” John returned, for once at an actual loss what she meant and without even a clue what she was getting at.
Rave, with her almost uncanny harem-reading abilities, stepped right into the conversation. “Ya know the whole ‘absorb all of the Lorylim to kill them’ thing? Are ya thinking about that?” The rest of the present harem, even those connected to his mind, looked at him with worried eyes. Of all the words of Izha, it seemed those had struck the most fear into them.
“I’m not and I won’t be,” John asserted, scolding himself for having not noticed their worry on this previously. “I’m trying to do the right thing and that means I have to put myself in harm’s way oftentimes, but I’m not a martyr at heart. I’d like to survive past the end of my story,” he told them. “Once I’ve changed the world to be more like I would like it, I say we retire in the Palace and concentrate on making a family or twenty.”
The joke didn’t land, the harem was too busy letting out sighs of relief. John was left wondering if he underestimated how willing to sacrifice himself he seemed to be to others. Further than that, given that his dearest partners in the world had that reaction, perhaps he was actually more leaning towards martyrdom than he thought?
‘I will have to spend some time in introspection...’ the Gamer thought, burning the relieved expressions around him into his memory. If there was a part of him that would rather die heroically for the good of the world than preserve the happiness of his women, then he needed to rein that part in. The only sacrifice acceptable was the one to save one of them. Everything else was for a person better than him. ‘For all my virtues, I’m not willing to be nailed to a cross while people would cry for me.’ “I love you – all of you,” he said out loud, to make the depressing feeling in the air go away.
The desolation of their surroundings was only a secondary concern.
When it came to unpleasant surroundings, the silent, empty building didn’t even rank in the top 10 of the last seven days. There were no horrifying Remus spectres running around, no Lorylim lodged in walls, no confused thought constructs corrupting the landscape and no liquified human remains anywhere. It was just an abandoned building with the occasional spore flying around – none of which were strong enough on their own to corrupt the bodies of the group. Whenever they found a denser concentration, either Salamander or Nia could take them out with ease.
In the spirit of preserving their surroundings in their search for clues, John favoured letting the blank take care of things. For a long time, they found nothing but empty bedrooms, kitchens and other facilities to make life comfortable. They even stumbled over the machine that must have been used for the gestalt ceremony, a layered, cone-shaped construction with several tanks on each level that had been connected via now broken tubes.
“No signs of the Sands of Time anywhere here...” John mumbled. “Maybe they struck here before they went east and Remus only became active after they were done here?” There was no definitive answer to the question, as no one that had witnessed the events unfold in total was there to speak to the Gamer. All they had for certain were the shattered remains and more of the confused building to explore.
Metra broke down another door for him, some of them were locked for some doubtlessly annoying reason, and stepped inside. She grunted in a surprisingly pleased fashion. “Hey, John, look at this.”
“And so end the Gestalts,” Metra said.
“Can I just say,” Rave chimed in, “that it bothers me a whole lot that it’s gestalts in English, but it’s a German word that would actually be ‘Gestalten’ in plural?”
“Since when do you fucking care about grammar, seizure hands?” Eliza wanted to know.
“Since right now.”
John thought while his harem bantered. Experience and power kept them calm to a degree that a regular human watching them would probably have found unnerving. Even with all the revelations of recent days, they continued to muddle on as always. A stressed mood was reserved for the actual dangerous situations they found themselves in from time to time. Watching a security tape in the safety of their temporary base didn’t qualify as such. Only the harem was in the room. Chemilia and Ted were scheduled to join them, but had been held back by something.
Something that must have been resolved, as both of the generals came barging into the room without knocking. “Bad news, John,” the pale-pink-haired woman announced, once she had closed the door behind herself.
“We’ve got so few of those at the moment,” the Gamer mumbled, his dry humour kicking in before his concern could. “What is it?”
“The Sands of Time are disappearing.”
John peeked up at that report. “What do you mean disappearing? Are they diminishing inside the barrier we set up?” A quick nod and the Gamer had just another thing to ponder about. “Fantastic, now we can’t be sure if Remus is actually forming a new body anymore. I’ll have to update the Horned Rat on this and ask that he lend me some tight-lipped operatives.”
Chemilia seemed unwilling. “Do we have to involve that infamous god?”
“Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” John answered with a proverb. “For all his scheming and enigmatic behaviour, I’m at least certain that my and Richard’s goals run in the same general direction. Keeping tabs on Remus and whether or not he returns is too important to have qualms about things. Still,” he looked to Nia, “I will insist that those operatives report to you as well. Finding out if and where the Sands of Time are now gathering is your highest priority.”
“Understood,” the general of the special forces said, bowing her head ever so slightly. “What is the secrecy level?”
“We’re keeping Remus’ potential return as secret as we can. Since his existence in the Hourglass isn’t exactly public knowledge, keeping the name under wraps should be easy. Rather than Sands of Time, the soldiers should be informed that it is Memory Sand. That it doesn’t exist doesn’t matter at the moment, we’ll just have to deceive them about it.” John sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Romulus can’t know. Lord knows what he will do when he finds out. He might lead a crusade here and set up shop just to find his brother again. I want myself to be the only reason why anyone might follow things in America. That way they won’t meddle directly. There’s also still the chance this isn’t Remus at all...”
“Are we keeping the Lorylim secret as well?” Ted asked.
“No, we’ll be upfront with that. We got somewhat of a handle on it, after all,” John told them. “That aside, we’ll have to introduce some stricter measures when it comes to checking on new arrivals in our cities. The Lorylim have a lot of bodies now, I would be surprised if they didn’t send at least a few our way. The exact way we handle that will have to be debated with parliament... as will be what we do with the surviving members of the East Gestalt and the land of both guilds.”
It was a cascade of tiring events.