Chapter 10-31 Cadre (III)

Chapter 10-31 Cadre (III)

What? The hypertube ruptured? [Stifled groan] Where where are they How the hells did they manage to jack a lightrail? The Nethers down! Traffic grids infested with mem-cons! And whats the point of rupturing it? The Sovereignty will notice immediately and pocketagh!

You know what, no questioning anything anymore. Lets just assume theseuhconsangs of ours here have a few sequences missing

A Sphere-Four Liminal Framewhere did that Sphere Four come from? Okay. Okay. Naeko, stop asking questions, youre just going to get madwere trying to stay calm this year. Calm.

[Deep exhale]

WARNING: DAEMON DETECTED

->DOMAIN: [WATER]

[Pause]

Jaus just Jaus.

[Sigh] Have to dam this flood before this ends in a cascade of Fallen Heavens.

-Chief Paladin Naeko

10-31

Cadre (III)

ONTOLOGY REVERTED

RESURRECTION COMPLETED

DOMAIN RESPAWN ENGAGED

ENGAGING THAUMIC CYCLER: 3501 THAUM/c

LOADING PHANTASMICS

Light is not meant to shatter into fissuring streams upon the chassis of existence, but when a lightrail is destroyed mid-transit and beams itself out from cracked lenses lining a hypertube, metaphysics gets a bit murky.

Flickering back into existence from a speckle of blood, Avo found himself standing on tubes he once traveled within as the world drowned under a cacophony of discordant noises. Flames roared. The wind squealed from all points graced by the fissuring luminosity. Distant sirens mingled with aero engines spinning hard at maximum thrust.

Something speared through the winds. Something was just about to

He touched the falling debris before it smashed into him. Reflex took hold where thought lagged. His Celerostylus swelled and time slowed. His haemokinetic mist came aglow as electricity arced through the moisture and the Canon of Haemaefication was invoked.

The debris melted into a shower of red, and Avo snatched the blood out from the air with a thought. Near ten tons of alloy, plastics, silicon, and other substances new to his Woundshaper sparked through his ontology. Suddenly, the structural aesthetic of the wreck became known to him: He just unmade a destroyed assault drone.

His senses yawned wider as his mass grew, spreading across countless other material patterns beyond it thereafter. The world around him expanded into a shape beyond even the reach of his vision. He could feel things miles beyond as his Heaven washed over the real. Presently, he found himself suspended over a vast crevice leading down to Layer Three, the section of tubes he halted on miles between two different districts.Ñ00v€l--ß1n hosted the premiere release of this chapter.

As his mind cleared and focus took hold, the presence of his Woundshaper furled outward as a nigh-transparent film of haemokinetic mist. The last drips of blood from the liquefied drone evaporated into the wavelength of his broadcast.

Impact trajectories pulsed red as flechettes cut out for him from afar. The projectiles came, and when they transgressed into his ontological borders, were unwoven in shape and structure both before they could arrive.

The Canon of Sangunitys Reign was like having a shapeless hand that could clutch everything around you in its palm. Yet, what it grasped was metaphysical, and what he felt were things bearing symmetry to his Woundshapers portfolio of domains.

His tactile senses swelled from feet to miles while his Phys-Sim screamed as ghosts surged into it, his cog-feed adjusting to before the spiking number of sequences required to estimate all that was happening around him.

There were hundreds of drones cutting through the skies and below him, and from those hundreds of drones spilled scything beams and darting flechettes. Hundreds of drones, and then substantially less as a wing of light swept through them.

Shrapnel plunged down like descending hail. This time, Avo consciously interacted with them. His cog-feed counted eight hundred and ninety-four thousand pieces traveling through the expanse of his influence. With a thought, he dissolved all of them as well, drinking in their mass.

Matter, light, blood, biology, and lighting. Aspects of existence felt were alight within the purviews of his mind. The metaphor changed.

Sanguinitys Reign was not handSanguinitys Reign was like resting something upon his tongue andwhen his canons allowed itdeciding to chew.

Scars of shattered brightness spread out before him like a lattice.

Avo forked himself through an opening as lightning unstitched and then restitched his form back together in strips and splashes.

Then, suddenly, he felt his Sangunity sinking inside one of the prismatic deltas like it was a sinkhole he could dip a finger into.

At five hundred feet in height, each of the four facets comprising the demiplanar construct led into a separate pocket containing a different golem. Their matter and forms were myriad, with some corresponding to his touch while others wafted between his fingertips like water. One, in particular, caught his attentionone that felt like a gnarled anchor curving rightward when he skimmed his mists through it.

He took a chance. He liquefied it with a thought and let the blood run free where it may. Relief settled through his structure. An unseen grip slackened from realitys throat. The sides of the delta turned opaque as the construct accelerated toward him in an explosion of motion.

Avo aimed another stride and put himself at the full fifteen miles it offered. He cast himself out and his perception tunneled. His lightning traveled the entire distance within a fraction of a fraction a second. Drones around him disintegrated outright as he left a trail of erupting fire that twitched upon the surface of reality.

Yet, as soon as he poured himself back into physical shape, he found the delta the same distance away from him and closing. Avo fought the urge to sigh. Abrels equation was mostly solved, but as usual with New Vultun, new problems like introducing themselves without courtesy.

Prismatic light erupted from the tip of the delta as it drew closer, swimming through fissuring obstacles left by the hypertube rupture without worry.

Avo strode twice more but found himself unable to outrun his pursuer. It was like their distances were tethered to an absolute number while all other moving bodies were variable. His cog-feed came alight with colors and sounds, warning of more spatial anomalies.

REND CAPACITY [WOUNDSHAPER]: 49%

New drones spilled out into existence from the various deltas, and Avo felt their numbers swell well past the ten-thousand count within the hundred-and-sixty-mile stretch of awareness provided by Sanguinitys Reign.

Brushing them with his domains, he felt aspects of blood, biology, and matter emanate from within them most of all. Their aesthetic was bee-like with a hint of cyberization, and the chitin looked like the armor on Draus new bio-rig. Not drones, then. Bioforms. Swarm bioforms.

He recalled vicarities of runs going sour in Sang territory. He would have seconds before the sky turned into a hive of flesh-grown missiles. If they couldnt breach his form, they would undoubtedly try to cook him out by beating their wings at a heightened pace.

The real danger remained that which they spawned from. Even as he strode again, it inched into the five-hundred feet radiustoo close for comfort now. He didnt know what else it was capable of or what would happen should he let it touch him, but he wasnt keen on finding out.

At least he wasnt keen on using himself to find out.

He was going to need to find a way to get the delta to expose itself again. A thought trailed through his mindcould he use his Sanguitys Reign to serve as localized Nether? The prospect ignited his focus even further as he cast his ghosts out.

All around him were options to select fromdrones and humming bioforms galore. He splashed back into physical shape just above another stretch of the hypertube and immediately had to convert himself into electricity as a wide of slashing light cut through him.

Abrel was still fighting five miles eastward. How the deltas had not contained her yet he did not know.

He accelerated again and a thousand bioforms splattered in his wake.

Shaking the thought free, he activated his Ghostjack and tried to channel his phantasmics through waves of haemokinetic moisture brushing across the expanse. His ghosts emerged from his Metamind and injected themselves across illimitable motes of blood, using them as conduits.

Casting into a drone next to the delta pursuing him, Avo cracked their semi-adaptive wards using a mix of traumas and linked himself to its manually controlled locus. The pilot, coldtech machine that it was, tried to fight him ineffectually. Its cognition still gave off something vaguely similar to thoughtstuff when he brushed it, but interfacing with it gave him a static chill.

There was something alien about the mind of a thinking machinethe pathing of its sequences offering nothing for Avo to bury his claws into. He liquefied the mech and moved on.

Accessing the Wyvern-IIMultifunction Assualt Platform, he directed it to approach the spatial construct chasing him.

As it drew within twenty feet of the delta, his broadcast wavelength waned and his connection began to fail. The drone itself folded and funneled into a facet of the deltas face and vanished from his grasp.

Well. That was troubling. He didnt want to be drained off to wherever the drone went.

Shifting his thoughts, he turned his attention to his Galeslither and sought a place of shadows. Perhaps if he couldnt avoid it materially, he would be able to escape as another aspect of space itself

A squadron of drones vitrified and shattered into a sprawl of glass mere feet above the tubes. Three other signatures materialized into existence. He felt them strike his Frame the same way Abrel did. Draus stood alone, separated from Essus and Chambers by a distance of miles. Essus had spawned exactly where Avo did, while Chambers was currently falling from the sky, screaming as he emerged from plumes of fire spewing out of a failings drones engines.

Avo had a new idea. He had several new ideas.

Channeling his ghosts through his mists again, he created links between himself and his group.

His cadre.

As the delta closed past four hundred feet, he cast his intentions out to each of them.

+Draus. Need you to create a gateway for me and kill it right after.+