Chapter 9-2 The Helix

Chapter 9-2 The Helix

This message is directed to all cadres attached to Assignment: Gutter-Crucible-Lacing-688-HalfDawn-Urs.

Do notrepeatdo not stray into the shadows. Most darkness in the gutters is natural. None thaumaturgic. However, leftover Ontologics from the Nolothi Usurpation have been noted to be still in effect. In plain terms, you are at risk of interception by Nolothi-classification bioformsghoul or otherwise.

Or pulled in. No individuals taken by the Darkness return or are ever found. Attempts have been made to penetrate this spatial anomaly. Currently, there have been no successes on that front.

As such, keep to your cadres and stay in the light of the drones. Let the drones make a perimeter before beginning your investigations.The inaugural upload of this chapter took place via N0v3l-B1n.

Keep together. Keep each other safe.

Steady the flame.

-Internal Paladin Memo, Shadows in the Gutters

9-2

The Helix

It was through the waste pipes connected to the Youmeng Sleeper Farms in Xin Yunsha that Avo and the others worked their careful descent down to the gutters.

Drifting in through the farms wasnt hard. The Galeslither allowed for much ease of access there. He breezed, a three-headed steed carved from clashing wind and storm, carrying the others along. Spoofing the twelve patrolling Specters, likewise, was a matter that took Avo meager minutes.

Through Zeins guidance and Avos Necrotheurgy, Exorcist patrols existed more as obstacles of delay rather than detection. Part of their protection was thanks to the Sleeper Farms, which housed approximately a hundred thousand dreaming workers.

In the Warrens, the Sleeper Farms existed as the most legitimate form of employment offered to many refugees. The imps paid werent bad either. If placed against working as an organ-bearer or some demeaning role for one of the Syndicates, it wasnt hard to see the appeal.

All one needed to do, was sleep. Little to no physical labor required. Merely apply to the available Nether-lobby silo and report to the location. There, a wall-mounted dreampod would display your mem-data from a holojector, and after stepping in and laying on the neural interfacer, the pod would pump you full of all the nutrients and chemicals needed for a tour in the Nether.

Of course, that was where the good ended.

New Vultun was a big city, but the logistical weight demanded by its consumers harbored a heaviness that could fracture even a titans bones.

Many needed to hide mem-data in a cheap and disposable mind, or needed to borrow proxy memories as capacity for a job or a Nether-lobby they were running. The Sleepers were always an option. The unfortunate would be kept lucid, assigned to puppet targets in cross-session war-sims. Their memories would be permanently altered, with grafted recollections befitting the time period of the engagement injected. The resulting rawness of their terror and joy rewarded players with a far more immersive experience.

That was when they werent serving as extensions for Crucibles on the side. Most came out broken. A few came out nulled. Such was life as FATELESS, mem-tags imprinted along the side of the silos voicing their pain.

+Ori-Thaum killed my mother.+

+FUCK YOU TOPSIDER HALF-STRANDS TO ALL THE GODSDAMNED HELLS+

+Im going to gun down as many Scalper shits as I can. For Lyra. My sweet Lyra.+

Sinking down aisles of screaming minds trapped in unwaking bodies, Avo listened to Zein as she tumbled within his Yondergales. She, unlike the others, had opted to stay outside the protections of an aerovec, choosing to yell the directions at him while running along tumbling storm clouds.

Through the twists and turns spilling out from a network of waste pipes connected to the pods he flew as a quiet mist. The sensation of pushing and squeezing through even the tightest confines instilled Avo with a sense of strange satisfaction: He could feel the filth gliding past his being, but it didnt touch him, slipping past him. It allowed him to appreciate the low beauty: The smear-crusted edges of ejection chutes, the fetid edges turned gleaming light slipping, fingers of neon hooked along the crevices.

Not even matter could inflict a choice he rejected upon him.

After spending a moment or two waiting on the eightieth floor for a swarm of Exorcists to pass below, they finally emerged into an ejection chute as wide as a barge that spewed a nigh-endless waterfall of waste into the Maw rounding the borders of Xin Yunsha.

REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 22%

Even after so long and carrying a load of a Regular, an Agnos, a screaming limbless ghoul, and an aerovec, his Galeslithers Hell was holding. He made the right choice not increasing the weight of the Heaven as Zein suggested. Balance was a virtue, and keeping to it, the winds possessed by Avo remained unfettered.

Arching under the block, they found an abandoned docking bay for offloading cargo resting just above the plates of Layer One. The lip of the edge was worn away by rising entropy. Access doors were welded shut and lined with polychromatic tarp where holes lined the walls.

Avo wasnt sure whose idea it was to build such a structure here above the Maw, but bigger fools had been put in charge of more important decisions.

Here, next to that welded door, Zein shouted while chewing on a techno-organic stem of Se1-Sure. Avo wondered if the Omnitech-made holy plant made her one with the Alloyed Will, whatever that was. Her body spiraled through the winds as she spun around the Galeslither. Twitching her neck, she missed the wing of Draus aerovec by a hair. Luck, skill or a blessing of the Fused Ones.

Arriving on the terrace of an abandoned habitat, Avo pulled out Draus aerovec first, the Regular steadied the vehicle without issue, even as the sudden change from torrential wind to still air tore another stray piece off from the aged aeros rear bumper. Accelerating slowly, she brought it around to a hover.

A note of incredulity sounded from her depths. +Can you?+

+Said try. More likely she blows herself up again.+

+What?+

+Anti-matter bomb. Inside her.+

He ended the session just as Draus anxiety spiked. Ah, simple pleasures.

Entering the tunnel, each step cast a shiver into the floor and walls as he passed, melting like candles. The liquid dark beneath his claws flowed, pulling him deeper and closer inward. He felt a spike of fear spilling over from behind him. Not Draus. Definitely not Zein. Kae.

He wondered if feeding the Agnos to the dark would prove inimical for its structure somehow. Seeing as it consumed the ghouls ghost, he wondered what Kaes might do. The sheer devastation that it might wreak was almost too tempting to resist. In scant seconds, the distance between him and the gateway turned from gulf to mirage, as if sensing his hunger for destruction.

He found himself standing before the twin doors of bone. On them, a cross parted them into four quadrants, each bearing a symbol. An owl eating a heart; a skull weeping endlessly; a man mutilating himself; and a figure engulfed in fire, embracing the flames.

The last of which flashed before him.

+WELCOME, DEFIANCE+

The loudness emanating from within the doorway made Avos mind shudder.

He shook his head. Does it always do that? he asked Zein.

I cannot say, she said. She twisted the hilt of her umbrella and

And Avo suddenly remembered it was a sword.

A long blade rippled, casting afterimages on the tapestry of space and time. A dragon circulated the edge of her blade as she shouldered the weapon, its form lengthening into a curved glaive. This is the first time I have been down here. The only other knowing of I have of this location is from the memory the Strix sent me.

Is that why you had me go in front? Avo asked, incredulous.

Zein nodded. Yes. That and this place has too many possibilities in play. It gives me a headache to read, truly. I wanted to see if anything would have killed you.

His glare slipped past the older Godclad and onto the aerovec gliding in behind them. Draus and Kae were following. If something could kill him, then

A hilt nudged his chest. That is a mistake, Zein said.

What? Avo asked.

Considering the ephemerals, Zein continued, face blank of jocularity. They die, Avo. If you find either of the two interesting, find them a Frame. We tread a path mortals cannot follow. Lambs can not follow lions.

Her words hung over him as she twisted her glaive, casting it's light above to part the flowing dark.

Shaking her words off, he turned to the pathway at hand, and took a step forward.

A click rattled from the door. The bone relief of the Low Masters dissolved. The veins of darkness flecked away.

Mustering his Heavens, Avo felt his blood surge as he pressed into the door, balming his mind with readied violence for whatever might await him on the other side.

The door sank inward at a push, its weight capitulating as if a curtain. Avo stepped into the grand confines that his former masters once indulged in, reviewing their planning and worship. Where the exterior delivered a front of muted darkness, the interior was a cascade of colors and silks. Four apses held multi-colored semi-circular frescos, colored church panes bearing the imagery of ages long past and histories forgotten.

The center of the room rose to become a dais, with four rune-carved paths trailing down its steps to vacant thrones of ebony. The interior itself was cavernous. Labyrinthine. Far larger than the outside suggested it would be, sprawling further than even his Whisper could travel.

Countless walkways lined the walls, leading into crevices of shadow, the railing perpendicular to the ground. Beneath the apses, Avo counted no less than a dozen intersections and bridges that defied the laws of gravity and geometry. The air with thick with a taste of some kind of antiseptic.

It wasnt until he stepped in fully and beheld the panes of shimmering glass that lined the corners of the room that he saw something shining in the distance. It looked as if a star. And a large, solid ball of chrome vines with concentric lanes of light spiraled around it.

Draus alarm speared into him with a note of surprise.

+Avo I think were in the fuckin void.+