Chapter 14-3 Know Your Enemy (I)

Chapter 14-3 Know Your Enemy (I)

+You taste that in the rain, tonight, listeners?

Thats the taste of shit.

Shit. Shit, and nothing but shit.

Thats the taste of quiet war spiraling out of control.

First, there was what went down at Nu-Scarrowbur and Mazzas Junction. A real full-on throwdown between some Highflame and Stormtree cadres. Were probably going to be seeing the mem-rips of that mess edited together and sold as an immersive experience within the next couple of days.

The problem doesnt end there, though. A little fox down the Warrens told me that Abrel Greatlingthats right, Greatlinggot picked up by the Paladins at the end of that mess, but Council Elder Mwaba DRongo is also under official custodysnatched right out of the Fires Height while the FATED where having their little get together about destroying the world the last time.

For those of you that are new, this doesnt happen.

Ive followed Paladin Samir Naekos career since before he made chief, and trust me, the guys supposed to be a fossil and a dud. Old enough to still remember Jaus, and just hopeless enough to let the ball keep rolling. A real designated downgrade since the brief tenure of Chief Paladin Siahm Ansaulgh, who unfortunately met her final cessation when she ended up encountering a rogue Fallwalker.

A rogue Fallwalker of abnormally high spherage and grafted with some very Omnitech-seeming ontologics. The mystery remains.

Anyway though, back to our consang Naeko. Hes got a few centuries on him. Knew Jaus before he went off to see the Big Nothing. Fought in the Low Apocalypse after the Godsfall, and nearly every Guild War after. Served with Ashthrone for a while before they had to burn his skein for just walking off the job and playing three-hundred consecutive hours of Stormjumpers instead of reporting in for the Fourth Guild War.

[Pause. Snorting laugh]

Youre a true legend, Naeko. Dont let anyone tell you otherwise.

Anyway, point Im getting at here is our buddy Samir suddenly found some burn in him that wasnt there before. Now aint that strange. Aint that curious? And aint that dangerous, being a proactive Paladin and all.

And now, an Oversec got hit by what the Nether is theorizing to be a Silver attempted breakout for the Elder, and Stormtree and Highflame are getting real square with each other up in Lights End.

Somethings going down. Something big.

If there was a time to keep your eyes open and heads down, this is it. And to get you in the mood, this is Before the Gun by Cas eldCanduir.+

-Cala Marlowe, The FATELESS Thoughtcast

14-3

Know Your Enemy (I)

[Phantasmic downloaded from locus. Skimmer. Interesting. Radiates perception. Makes things around it easier to notice. Lingers too. Seems designed to burn through Incogs. Impressive. Will need to avoid this using shadows if we can.]

[Shifting shadows. This group should have higher mem-clearance. More walls opening for us. Two miles away from loci-cluster designated as operational nexus.]

[Yes. We should also change our pants.]

[Why? Not really our body. We can just dive into another one. Feces dont hurt us. Were also leaving the droppings in shadows. Planes of darkness. No one will ever find them.]

[Feels dirty.]

[Weve eaten worse.]

[Still feels dirty.]

[Weve been inside Chambers mind.]

[Hm. Good argument.]

Perhaps we can have the mule hide the filth deeper within itself? the Woundshaper suggested.

Perhaps you can find a substance that better embodies your structure, the Galeslither shot back.

The world within Avo was a vortex of noise but none of the chaos distracted him.

His subminds debated while his Heavens bickered. All the while he used the totality of his abilities in tandem. Walls unveiled themselves as he flashed Benhatas sequences to once forbidden pathways while he swam through shadows to avoid winnowing scythes cast by external perception.

His Sanguinity supplemented his DeepNavs functions as he groped through the labyrinth comprising the Javelins demiplanar bowels, through such means he slipped by patrolling Skimmers and personnel with comparative ease.

The strangest thing about the buildings layout was its altered dimensionality. Sometimes, straight wasnt straight. Sometimes, if you wanted to go straight, you needed to put your foot against the wall and start walking up.

Once his weight was set, geometry adapted to the vectors from where his feet were pointed, making it all but impossible for someone to truly fall in this place.

[Aborbed some mem-data from Skimmer. Locus might also be sequenced with focus-vectored Thoughtwave Disruptor. Will be distracting for most people. Probably fatal for us.]

[Wonder what happens if we die while sheathed in Benhata.]

[Resurrection. Probably. Fits material anchor. Will come back where he is.]

[What happens if we die while moving without a body?]

Silence reigned as his subminds filtered through his sea of memories to compile a proper answer. If he was unburdened by Rend, he doubted the annihilation of his mind alone would be enough to kill him for good. He wondered if he would be remanifested in reality at a location where he last had a body or if he could just emerge using a nearby catalyst related to his domains.

[Maybe we can eat the locus? Do what we did earlier?]

[No. Already had Necros scouting out what happened with the locus outside the office earlier. Their response was too fast. One lost locus is an irregularity. Strange. Maybe a sequencing problem that ended in fragmentation. Two is a pattern. Three is a Necro actively jacking through your network. And the one outside an N-Def internal security pool cant be hidden. Theyll go on alert.]

[Can wait for someone to come by and dive deep using their shadows. Get in that way.]

[Maybe. Risk high. Estimating over 1243 Skimmers pulsing within the room alone. A single Skimmer is shaving twenty ghosts away from us. Going in directly with Incog active is like feeding ourselves through a grinder.]

Avos minds grew unified with a common growl of annoyance.

[Might be more useful to be stable mind right now. Hard to notice. Can hide in sequences.]

[Wont have Benhatas knowledge. Wouldnt even know where to go or which systems to access.]

[Maybe we can kill ourselves and see if we can reset? It should be ideal form right now.]

A small part of Avo was tempted, but most of him still yearned to remain to retain his current enhancements. It didnt take his subminds simulations to know that devolving from a free-moving thoughtform to being caged within a single body would feel more like imprisonment than reversion.

An old allegory leaked into his thoughts from one of his newly seized memories. Allegory of the cave. He has seen the light. He knew the edges of his limitations. He didnt want to go back. Going back was hurt. Going back was self-harm and mutilation and capability-castration.

And going back didnt ensure his access at all.

[Keep channeling Benhata. Maybe he can remember something else. Someone in the pool maybe?]

[Benhatas not that useful right now. Was a Glaive. Barely passed as a diver. Just meat for a real Incubi. We need to exercise asymmetric thinking right now.]

With a thought, he shifted his mind to draw from the best sequences and constructs accumulated from the Incubi in his mental inventory. The softness of his focus sharpened. The width of socio-cultural considerations vanished behind the hard science of problems encountered and potential solutions.

His current goal was simple: to subsume and steal away the innermost knowledge flowing through Ori-Thaums systems. Another avenue of attack included the Nether itselfthough such an act would be beyond loud with how many ghosts were welded to his mind and how many witnesses he would leave.

The cluster was a transit point that was unconnected from any Auto-Seance sessions or other means of direct access. All its mem-data were gathered from ghosts cast into outside loci that would be transferred in and intensely reviewed before being included with the information in the archives.

He could pour himself into a locus in transit, but that didnt protect him from the Skimmers if he wanted to keep running his Incog.

No. The best way to access it was directly, but using his Woundshaper to open a path through the walls would leave too much evidence that an undetected Godclad was traipsing where they didnt belong while his Galeslithers wind currents were equally abnormal.

There was still something to be said about making an attempt by swimming across various stretches of shadow, but if he wished to know his path, he needed to expose his mind, and such would leave him shredded.

The eventual answer to his problem was simple.

He needed to engineer a situation where the Skimmers had to be diverted. Enough to grant him gaps or a way to access the cluster of loci festooned at the core of the room.

This required more planning

Something rattled against his consciousness. Avo felt the eldritch fires of his Frame quaver the same way they did when he first faced another Godclad. Reflexively shifting back over to Benhatas mind, sequences snapped back in place as a memetic ban on his memories was lifted.

Approximately twenty-three floors above him, he sensed an active Heaven slowly crawling down toward the bottom of the structure, moving uncannily like a snapping rubberband, parts of its presence reaching forward before snapping back.

CLASSIFICATION: SPHERE III [EST. 940 THAUM/c]

->SENTINEL OF THE WAVES UNSEEN

[Benhata knows this one. They were friends. Once. Andraga eldVanlein. Logistical Godclad. Domains of Electricity, Signals, and Speed.]

And just like that, the equation changed once more. He shifted his mind once more as a new objective filled his focus.

He wasnt as he was before. There was no need to approach things so directly.

Not when he could possibly get someone else to do the work for him.