Chapter 9-12 The Beast Unseen

Chapter 9-12 The Beast Unseen

So so, the Twice-Walker is a very specialized Heaven. A veryuhvery specialized design. I think it was made made by Highflame j-just recently. Just before the beginning of the Fourth Guild War.

Its designation is between Porter and Breaker. Its actually not not a Heaven of Glass, butbut glass is one of its domains. Its actually a Hea

So so, the Twice-Walker is a very specialized Heaven. A veryuhvery specialized design. I think it was made made by Highflame j-just recently. Just before the beginning of the Fourth Guild War.

It's designation is between Porter and Breaker. It's actually not not a Heaven of Glass, butbut glass is one of its domains. It's actually a Heaven of Reflection, with Domains of Radiance, Space, Glass, and Reflection all working in tan-tandem.Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

It's it's been rated for Sphere Four Frames and above. Very vulgar but but quite effective and elusive too.

But but there are countermeasures. The Domain of Space is is always vulnerable to Backlash.

I'll see see if I canuhcome up with something to to affect it.

-Kae Kusande to Jelene Draus

9-12

The Beast Unseen

+Hes in.+ Avo ran his tongue across his fangs. +Hes mine.+

+Dont get all high on yourself,+ Draus cautioned. +You aint got him yet.+

But Avo did. And he knew from the very moment Mirrorhead wandered in, barging through the memories without preparation or caution. Even in the realm of the mind, the scion of the Greatlings thought himself above reproach, that the power of his Heaven could somehow protect him here.

Not so, poor Guilder. Not so.

These wilds belonged to beasts of a different make, and here, even titans could be made prey.

Mirrorhead sailed across memories, his review of the mem-data peripheral at best, perception setting a course across memory, but the waters he charted were but the shallows. Sloppily, he left matters of protection entirely to his wards.

Ah. The Phalanx pattern. Avo was familiar with the phantasmic. Twenty layers of checkpoints lined with oscillating traumas, each portioning Mirrorheads consciousness from surface to deepest, segregating his thoughts into manageable districts. Not only content to serve as multiple blockades, the phantasmal protections moved, each shuffling over the other like a cycle of ever-escalating tides.

It spoke volumes of the Syndicate boss ego that he was using wards usually meant for Highflames forward-operating demiplanes or administrative command fortresses.

To be caught within the stacked defenses would shatter an Osarai Memguard within seconds.

Avos wards were ample, but he had tuned them for versatility and mind-diving, not raw combat. Should he find himself discovered, there was little doubt regarding the threat the Phalanx posed.

But Necrojacking was so rarely about force on force. No. More often, there were two duels in play: the first a tale of awareness, to detect your foe from the forest of memories; the second, a clash of two bodies of water, each seeking to dilute and subvert the other.

With how Mirrorhead operatedflooding Chambers mind with over ten thousand ghostshe saw himself as impregnable. Overwhelming. How very Highflame.

Shrouded behind a beltway of twenty orbiting mass graves filled with writhing bodies set ablaze, Mirrorhead approached as the nucleus of a star system, the rings around it sliding across each other like a deck of cards. To amateurs, it would be a staggering sight, the show of force overwhelming like a tsunami, an avalanche. Even Chambers memory shivered against the immensity of foreign ghosts marching through him.

Avo, however, found himself delighted. More and more he had the measure of his foe. He had experimented with his implants and Heavens in preparation for this. Tested how his new enhancements might play with his Necrojacking.

Today, he would honor Mirrorhead as his first official mark.

Channels of mem-data spilled down from Mirrorheads invading Mind-Palace, dipping down and rifling through Chambers sequences. The Guilder operated with breadth but no depth. He would sweep the mind clean in moments, but the details would evade his notice, left only to the automatic functions of his ghosts.

And so, Avo accessed the functions of the hive and sent out a command. He felt Draus notice drift over.

+Acknowledged,+ the hive said. +Beginning transfer. Expending biomass to keep hosts alive.+ A new interface popped up in his mind. Circuits formed in the structure of the void ship, each channel connected to the countless Helios embedded in the cloning pool. Needles pierced their skins. Blood was drawn. The biomass of the pool dipped, but in its place, coursed countless mingling streams of crimson, blood flowing into a newly shaped compartment formed just below the nexus.

Beneath Avos feet, he felt two pinches. It wouldnt be long now. He had been yearning for a chance to use this.

+Whats this?+ Draus asked. +You gonna use your Heaven?+

+Yes,+ Avo said. Grinning. +Wait. Watch.+

As blood was drawn, he deposited himself in the form of a Scalper, injecting his mind deeper into a sequence, within a false series of memories he placed within Chambers.

A false recollection was structured: five Scalper enforcers abreaking through the G-Tube capsule with the help of two drones. Through physical violence alone, they brought Chambers and the techs down. Believable harm was painted onto each member of Conflux via memory artifacts taken after Draus conversation'' with Chambers. As such, they all looked distinctively wounded enough to fool the unfocused eye.

All except for one deliberate detail: Chambers was wearing the wrong rig: the Nightmantis. This, among countless other small mistakes, was sprinkled through Chambers sequences. Obvious errors incremented into the sequences designed to pulland haltthe attention of Mirrorheads sweeping ghosts.

Stashed with mem-cons, viruses, and other observational phantasmics, Avo had turned the former enforcers mind into a pseudo-labyrinth of his own design.

He didnt expect his traps to overwhelm his preys defenses. He just needed Mirrorhead to linger in place long enough for his Ghostjack to twin enough symmetry for him to spoof his way into Mirrorheads defenses.

Only a fool or a ghoul.

Or a Godclad.

It occurred to him that Zein might very well have done the unthinkable here. How had she made it to her old age acting as she did? Was it all her Heaven.

No matter. The task remained. And Avo knew exactly what he needed to subvert, to get deeper.

An atmosphere of anxiety and frustration stained the mem-data of these far waters that were Mirrorheads short-term memories. The actual phantasmics only rose in lonesome structures five rungs inward. Their shapes rose heavy and pointed, spire-like blades hailing phantasmal stratocumulus, the false sky kissed by faint brightness, the dawn spilling forth from the lip of the horizon. The blocks representing each phantasmic were battlements of gothic radiance, vast walls gold painted titanium painted with pastels of glass mosaics, painted iconography dedicated to weapons and instruments instead of people.

Never people.

Faint shivers of ethereal fire quavered as interlocking wings flew over the blocks like apparitions, making them seem as if candles.

Some who post in the Nether claim that Highflame lacked culture. That it was just blind ego-apotheism held up by cult-like militarism. Such was a lie. The Golds were people of symbology. They strove for embodiments. Often, they fell flat. But Avo knew of them to never question their resolve and might.

And to exploit their inflexibility.

You see, the problem with the Phalanx was also that which made it seem so formidable. The wards themselves. Necrotheurgy was a flexible art, but there was a rhyme and order to its foundation, namely, the purpose of symmetry.

For the revolving layer of wards to interlace and pass through one another without smashing the traumas together, a moment of alignment was required. Alignment, and an opening.

To slip past the wards, he didnt even need to wreathe himself in copied memories repeatedly. Rather, he just needed to maintain a functional facade long enough and use the wards behind him to his advantage. With each repetition, he would descend deeper and deeper inward. Until he was finally within the confines of Mirrorhead himself.

A grim bemusement swelled within him.

There was always something to do with an elevator when it came to Mirrorhead.

The crossover came languid, more placid surf splashing on a beach than crashing tide thanks to his enhanced reactivity. On the cusp of impact, the structure of the oncoming trauma and the trauma he passed through behind him.

A flash of memories spilled out as raw mem-data, announced raw and clear within the confines of the Metamind. Avo scoffed. And here was obvious proof he wasnt dealing with an actual Necro: No regard for internal security either. The ruler of Conflux clearly thought he was untouchable.

To Avo's surprise, he found portions of the memory familiar. The screams. The flickering outline of a womans form was painted over the firmament via countless Ori-Thaum phantoms. The former matriarch of the Greatlings and Mirrorhead's mother. A woman that Highflame itself seemed desperate to forget, censoring her name and memory from the Nether itself.

Indeed, the memory only grasped the vagueness of her personhood. If that. She had long hair, possibly. A shrill voicebut that mightve been more due to the screaming. The remaining sequences formed a peripheral snapshot of that day. Pain. Sorrow. Disbelief.

A child crying. The choked sobs of a younger Jhred Greatling escaped from his throat, despite his attempts to fight it. He forced himself to watch what the Incubi did to his mother. He knew he wouldnt remember. He forced himself anyway.

It was really quite pathetic. The longer Avo lingered in the Guilders mind, the less he thought of the other Godclad. What kind of idiot uses a major city-wide event that countless people were witness to as a conjoining gateway for their traumas.

Mixing memories he already had with assets spliced from his ghosts and rarer artifacts he had to copy from Mirrorheads memories, Avo altered his outer phantasmal architecture and passed through the second layer using the conjunction. The process repeated itself up to the eleventh, with each crossing demanding only patience and analysis.

Things got a bit interesting again with the twelfth to eighteen layers as the inner rings began to shift and change positions faster, their switches becoming randomsometimes even three at a time. Finally. Some actual paranoia and rigor.

If only Mirrorhead decided to use something other than various memories collected from the day of his mothers demise to pacify each of his protections. A lesson for the uninitiated: Use very, very specific memories when it came to creating wards. The more unique the circumstance, the harder for Necros to spoof. Speed gave Avo an edge, but it was Mirrorhead that failed in upholding a proper defense.

The first Phalanx Avo dived with Walton had different associated memories for each ring. And the switching started from the eighth. Here, there might as well have been a red carpet as Avo timed his crossing again and again until he was finally behind the innermost walls, finally in the section of the fifteenth.

The wards ahead were finally interchanging at a pace faster than near-unmoving, and so too was the access memory switched for something far more specific as well. Ah. So even Mirrorhead wasnt that hubristic.

No matter. A steady search through the mem-data showed Avo the sequence he was looking for: the memory Mirrorhead had of speaking to him. Not when they first met in the aerovec, but rather Avo induction into Conflux, in the very same room Chambers was spasming in.

Perfect. It had all the components he needed to install

A spike of phantasmal lightning crackled out as a phantasmic at the center of Mirrorheads mind thundered with the spill of another mind leaking over. Auto-Seaence. Someone was accessing the Metamind from within.

Almost immediately, he felt the waters of their perception splash againstand throughthe insides of Mirrorheads wards.

Whoever this was, they had complete access to his mind. And with how quickly and deeply they worked, this wasnt a sloppy amateur with too many ghosts like Mirrorhead.

No. This was the reflexive sweep every Necro that made it past their first hundred dives got used to making.

WARNING: NEW ACCRETION DETECTED

[UNIDENTIFIED] AWARENESS: 3%...8%

The attention of the newcomer bore down closer and closer to Avo just as Mirrorheads mind lurched with exhaustion, turning inward.

Instinct screamed for him to jack out, experience, on the other hand, revealed a path toward continued subterfuge right in front of him.

Firing his Ghostjack, Avo drew shape from the memories of his past once more.