Chapter 10-9 Consolation

Chapter 10-9 Consolation

+THOUSANDHAND! THOUSANDHAND! TREACHEROUS LEECH! TRAITOROUS SOW! RETURN WHAT IS OURS! GIVE US BACK OUR HELIX! GIVE US BACK OUR THRONES! GIVE US BACK OUR FRAME!

GIVE US BACK OUR FUTURE!+

-Thoughtcast from [REDACTED VIA OFFICIAL GUILD CENSOR-EDICT] moments before Thoughtwave Suppression

10-9

Consolation

The locus pattern was a brittle thing of oscillating patterns. The softness inherent to the material surprised Avo when he first caressed it with a tendril of blood.

Peeling the metal free from a crashed aero, he found it smoldering a mere sixty feet away from his point of egress. While studying the locus, he dug out a scoop of flesh from the mangled remains of the pilot and what tasted like their family. The was a likeness in their flavor, even charred.

Peckishness sated by his snack, he liquefied the wreckage and drew it into his mass, casting branches of tendrils out from his wrist to better cocoon the locus. He heard rumbles of distant impacts and smelled the scent of his brethren scampering two hundred feet away. A soft snarl tore from his throat. He felt as if reduced, somehow; reduced to the nature of a baseline ghoul.

Netherblind, he focused on his other senses.

Sending out a call using his Echoheads, a static portrait of the Warrens slid into his senses and whispered to him rumors of destruction. Aeros were still falling. He frowned at that. Most vehicles had their own locus. By all means, the memories and phantasmics stored within the ghosts should still function on their own, even severed from the public Nether.

As he drew the locus into the vicinity of his Metaminds halo, he formed a tactile link and interfaced with its systems. Mem-data booted and revealed twisted sequences and warped memories at a glance. His ward quivered lightly as he identified over a dozen mem-cons festering even in shallow waters.

A clearer theory formed in his mind. The aeros were likely subverted before the Thoughtwave Detonation. Perhaps the detonation was a direct response to the crashing aerosa mass mem-con attack made to overwhelm a district or even a Sovereignty.

The prime question remained: Why?

Scrying through the locus, he heightened his reflexes and worked through its interior sequences, siphoning out cleansed ghosts no longer afflicted by whatever thought-plagues usurped its functions.

Ghosts: [441]

In the end, he was only able to restore a quarter of the active ghosts within the locus. No matter. He would take this opportunity to find others and study their condition as well. For now, all he truly needed was the structure of the locus itself.

Strands unfurled from the blood cocoon fused around the mind-imitating crystal. Through the air, they stung into the fragility of the locus exterior without difficulty, each drinking away at the thaumaturgic patterns comprising the object's matter.

Within the grasp of his Heaven, he felt the locus unravel.

He hadnt yet invoked his Canon of Memory to capture the structure of the locus in perpetuity as he had with tungsten, but that was in due time. For now, a test was due.

It was time to see if he could channel multiple patterns of matter at once.

Drawing more pieces of stray rubble and punching his haemokinetic reach into even the plascrete beneath his feet, he began to siphon matter into blood, his senses accelerating, the world slowing. More, however, was an expanse of emptiness that called to his Metamind, a phantasmal gravity pulling at his thoughtstuff, his ghosts. The rivers of blood flowing out from his body now pulled him apart at the seams. Less and less did he feel the pilot to a Sangeist. More, his very being was being woven into the heights of the Woundshaperthe form of an old god remolded to his will, now alight with an ethereal shroud.

Where once his blood merely gleamed like a lustrous metal, a new quality layered into his towering design as the smoothness of his ichor took on crystalline facets of loci, studding the borders of his manifested crimson with faint edges.

With but a thought, he infused the structure of his own ontology with a ghost, linking with the flowing mass that was his blood. The transfer between his Metamind and locus-channeling blood was near instantaneous. A phantasmal sheen sheathed spills of running crimson.

It worked. The sensation of binding his mind to what amounted to his skin, or a multi-functional limb, was uncanny. It was like feeding additional awareness from ones mind into their own hand.

As he integrated his Metamind into his Heaven more fully, he found himself capable of shifting the central center of his thoughts. Fascinatingly, the halo once rippling out atop his mind now expanded its broadcasted wavelengths over the jaws of his spire, just above where the caged patterns burned.

Avos mind went blank.

DOMAIN OF AIR

HUBRIS: ATTEMPTING TO DRAW AND SHAPE HYPER-HEATED AIR WILL RESULT IN THAUMIC BACKLASH

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 38%

REND CAPACITY [GALESLITHER]: 13%

Right. Yes. Mach speeds had a tendency to heat the air up. He needed to slow down before he got too fast. Keep a reasonable pace for now. He checked his Phys-Sim and slowed his propellers, keeping himself under Mach two.

The ascent that followed was an awkward one. As it turned out, when one barely knew how the forces of lift and flight worked, not even relying on a mental physics simulator could supplant necessary knowledge. More than once he needed to shift back over into his Galeslither as an emergency, flattening his velocity down to nothingness to avoid losing control. His travel stuttered in such increments while he shot out from the hexagonal rifts of Layer One.

It was when he finally rose into the Spine of the Warrens that he first caught sight of what mightve caused the subversion of the aeros.

As the strands of his Woundshaper brushed over a stretch of space formerly occupied by a traffic lane, an aerovec came sailing down toward him, its presence only revealed as it entered the periphery of his outer-lattice constructs. Spreading his crimson brambles wide, and helped by the slowness of the vehicle itself, he examined its form and found it to be in the shape of an automated delivery platform a type akin to the one that shuttled Chambers and the techs back over Conflux headquarters.

He cleaved the aero-transport open with a tendril and started the process of its deconstruction, faintly aware of the trajectories left by other aeros passing nearby. It was odd how he could see further than he could sense in the Nether. Usually, it was the opposite way around. Nonetheless, as he dissolved the matter of the aero before it could knock him off course, he injected a tendril into its locus and found himself greeted with the same mem-cons again.

Only, the ones in this vehicle were more intact, and the meme-data listed the last mind the sequences interfaced with.

The traffic loci. The aeros were subverted passing through traffic. Turning his gaze upward, more flying shapes fell like a shower of alloyed stars. Yet, it did not end in one way. Beyond the flickering phase gate lining the portals forming the mouths of Layer Two, coruscating flames spewed free of falling wrecks as they trailed smoke down through holographic tides of flowing errors painting the phantasmal skies above the Spine.

It wasnt just limited to the Spine. It went up the Warrens. And if the Throat was compromised, then Lights End likely was as well.

Ghosts: [561]

Taking the opportunity to collect ghosts in the chaos, he drank in what he could clean from the locus and boiled the rest hollow with a trauma-pattern from his Ghostjack. Turning to the Galeslither, he caught and hunted more aerovecs, trapping them in his Yondergales to better gather desired resources.

Time snapped back to baseline but he still managed to net himself six aeros. Similar points of subversion lingered within each one. Attacking the traffic system was a viable strategy, but it was loud. Avo remained unsure what the intent behind such a tactic was, only that the Thoughtwave Detonation was increasingly looking like an appropriate response.

Ghosts: [1032]

Checking his time again, he found himself near the five-minute mark. Halting in place, he turned to gaze upon the districts nearby. Far fewer crashed aeros littered the streets than he expected, but a slow suspicion rose within him. Checking the mem-data he claimed from the mem-cons, he studied the behavior patterns of the vehicles around him and came to a realization.

They werent being ordered to crash, they were being repossessed for use as makeshift anti-air missiles, to knock other aeros out of the sky.

More and more, he felt this might be a case of mem-con spillover. Like someone leaving a point of subversion active after they finished their dive. Somehow, such incompetence didnt seem like Zeins work, though the scope hinted at immense Nether influence as well.

[WARn-123n-ERRO!!]

His cog-feed crackled. Then, a distant flash called to his attention. The winds shifting, he angled his Galeslither to see what was blinking at him from the periphery.

There, enshrouding the armored blocks of Nu-Scarrowbur, he saw the faintness of a being looking at him from beneath the threshold of light. Graced with twelve arms and a tri-hued star for a skull, he noticed the other entity for but a fleeting instant before it faded back into the light, going from a being towering over megablocks to being nowhere at all.

A moment of silence passed.

Something turned in Avos gut. The sensation of a drop took him.

Instinctively, he shifted back into his Woundshaper just as a javelin sculpted from strings of shivering radiance lanced at him from out of nowhere.