Chapter 24-4 Defilement (II)

Chapter 24-4 Defilement (II)

+Remember. You are the mind. You are not the emotion. You must decide everything, access everything, know everything without drowning in everything.

See, being a Necro is pretty simple. You just gotta learn how to drown without dying. No breathing in the water, though. Itll steal your breath. And someone will know youre there.+

-Undiver, Necrojack

24-4

Defilement (II)

The last strings of restraint within Avo broke as he manifested the full might of his Heavens. Damn his need for stealth. Damn the quiet game. He needed Emotion brokennulled.

He needed to do it now.

Thousands of kilometers away, within a tower overlooking an enclave, whirling winds twisted around Avos recently constructed sheath as chronology and air were wed as a rising tempest. Flowing gold painted the paths of rushing gales. A pulse of blood spread out and connected Avo to every ton of blood he could sustain. The cackles of the Woundmother and the shrieks of the Fardrifter proclaimed the coming of miracles as Avos reflexes accelerated to the point of absurdity.

Yet, unwilling to leave anything to chance, Avo invoked a canon to lift his relative advantage in reactivity to something total. Something absolute. Something that surmounted the will of passing time.

->DOMAIN (SPACE-CHRONOLOGY)

->CANON: NINE FUTURES FLOW - THE USER CAN DIVIDE THE PASSAGE OF TIME FOR [250 KILOMETERS] OF REALITY INTO NINE DIFFERENT STREAMS. EACH STREAM THAT MOVE SLOWER WILL NEED TO HAVE THE DILATION OFFSET TO ANOTHER STREAM TO MAINTAIN TEMPORAL BALANCE; A PHYSICAL ENTITY OR OBJECT MUST BE PRESENT IN EACH OF THE NINE STREAMS

A hurricane exploded out from the heart of the enclave but its winds swept the city as nine passing channels. Startled thoughtcasts spilled in from Kae and countless others. He ignored them. He ignored everything but the battle at hand. He ignored even his templates as he heard Draus calling for him.

There was only the dive. Only the fight. Only him, and the one he was going to break.

He was going to reach into Emotions mind this time. Shred his ego to the quick. Take from his memories all he could and obliterate every last node he seeded in the Nether.

Ejecting haemokinetic constructs across each stream of his Nine Futures, Avo twisted time to his favor at the eye of the storm.

The Nether-lag between his cadre spiked, but so it went. He couldnt allow this moment to slipto risk Emotion vanishing as Shotin shifted the planes once more or another unknown warmind to be unleashed against him.

Every one of Emotions oncoming splinters went from a rain of arrows to being frozen raindrops, Avo pressed his own counterattack as he withdrew his subminds from their separate tasks, concentrating the fullness of himself in this present battle.

Drawing from Peaces mastery of trauma, Avo resequenced his splinters as he sent them rushing forward in sweeping waves. Emotions Delusion-cast fragments were sallying out from four ruptured minds. They all bore their own defensesConundrumwards, also taken from Peace. It would take an absurd concentration of trauma to smash through them even with Avos mastery over time.

No. He would open his path in a different way. And he would follow the trail which they left to find Emotion himself.

The first wave of Avos splinters crashed and broke in a detonation of thoughtwave distortions. Splinters were smeared out of the Nether as ghosts dissolved. Pockets of nothingness opened and Avo sent his second line surging through. The third clashed against the remainder of Emotions splinters as a diversionary action while also pinning their opposition in place.

As Avo splashed into the Seekers inner worlds, he found their palaces utterly resequenced. Shaped into a single pathway leading to a distant Auto-Seance. It resembled a lonesome road made from the stuff of memories and at the very end rose a rot-claimed tower that pierced the passing stormclouds above, projecting sessions to places unseen.

Avo made no attempt to hide himself as he traveled down the pathways, threading his splinters through the mem-data and devouring every ghost he could. But as he did, memories spilled into him. Moments taken from Waltons pastmoments that included Avo. Places, faces, and scenes that he knew.

Flashes portrayed a ghoulling kept in a cage as Walton showed him acts of Necrotheurgy, as he tried to teach the beast ethics, as time passed and he carried the monsters mind from body to body, attempt after attempt. But the creatures progress to becoming Avo grew twisted. Perverted.

Instead of Walton refining the ghouls mind, he began to take on more qualities of the monster he sought to uplift. Intrusive moments merged. Moments of fangs tearing into supple flesh. The exhilarating bitter and sweet of blood and adrenaline-soaked muscles. A scream of a child as claws peeled bits of them away to get at the softness within.

The haze of gore receded. Avos perception shifted, and he found himself staring at Walton feasting on a corpse. The corpse of the boy. The corpse of Aurrie, as Essus wept and wept. He saw Walton slitting Draus throat and slipping his tongue into the welling gorge. He saw Walton offer himselfleash, collar, and allas nu-dog to Mirrorhead, crawling on all fours, barking when called upon.

More memories came: Walton capturing Kae; Walton triggering the rash in her over and over. Walton forcing Chambers to feast on the malformed homunculi, the former enforcer eyeless, earless, limblessa screaming torso fattened for the harvest.

Avo saw Walton finally forced into a cage alongside him, filthy, naked, and malformed. A ghost-made chain ran around his neck, sinking down past the bars below them, sliding deeper and deeper into the abyss. A scent of citrus remained, but it was tainted by blood and offal. Tainted by defiled memories.

Twitching, gibbering, and broken, Walton turned Avo and simply shrugged. As it goes. We all belong to someone else. But I found my master. I remember my master. I remember my master

Other cages rose through the dark, and within them lay other members of the cadre. Wombrash consumed their wretched bodies, but they repeated as a chorus alongside Walton. As it goes. As it goes. As it goes

Avo launched a trauma into the mem-data. The sequences around him fragmented as he laid his own pathrelaid the tracks of proper history in defiance of Emotions insult.

His hatred for the Low Master was beyond a thing of feeling now. The affront was philosophical. Metaphysical. Blasphemous.

For all of Waltons faults, he passed as an emancipated man. One who gave everything to see his greatest work freed from all chains.

Even ones of blind adoration.

The memory that replaced the falsehoods was that of Waltons ultimate demise. Of when he forced Avo to null him, and in that paradoxical action, set Avo free. The gesture was purely symbolic, but to a Godclad, what was a symbol but the substance of the metaphysical? The ideal?

In the back of his mind, Peace broke through. Peace. Louder than all the other templates. [Hes goading you. Hes fucking luring you in. You need to stop. You know this, you stupid cunt! He picked this battlehes prepared for this. Break these minds and turn back. Turn back and extract the stupid shit you came here to claim!]

Thoughtcasts from every of his cadre went unanswered as Avo acted without thought. Reassembling the totality of his ego, the concentration of his ghosts swelled past fifty million. The accretion he formed around Shotin erupted into a mountain of rising steam.

A shocked sputter slipped from the Seeker as his voice turned incredulous. +What in the fuck+

The next phase of the attack came as a tidal wave slamming down on the Nether. No longer was Avo forced to hide within Shotins demiplanes for protection, and no longer were Kare and the rest of the customers lost to their stupor. But they were more than just freed. Now, thoughtstuff exploded outward from their Metaminds, splashing everyone within the establishment.

Short-term recollections and chaotic mental murmuring broke against Avos protections, but the sudden amplification of every movement in the Nether was an unbalancing one.

Kare cried as she clutched her skull, and Shotin reached to steady his niece.

But before he could, the assault came in the form of broadcast traumas. Hyper-charged by whatever warmind was empowering them, the initial bombardment landed cognitive warheads. Eighty percent of the guests were nulled immediately.

The remaining twenty held a heartbeat longer.

Only Shotin and Kare were spared as Avo broadened his defenses, encompassing both of them. He tried to reach out to the customers he subverted earlier. The drones. Nothing. The Auto-Seances he installed didnt respond to his session. Another pointless act of mass murder to get at a Seeker.

Emotion clearly didnt care about retaining Clan DRongos services long-term. A butchery of this scale in the Tiersthe Elysiums no lesswas going to bear far greater consequences and scrutiny than just another genocide of the FATELESS.

As blastwaves of augmented traumas greeted Avos wards, he found himself once again awed by the Conundrum phantasmic he took from Peace.

IMPACT SUSTAINED

ADAPTING COUNTER-TRAUMATICS

COG-CAP - 3%

IMPACT SUSTAINED

ADAPTING COUNTER-TRAUMATICS

COG-CAP - 4%

The mass of traumas arrayed against him would have been enough to depopulate half a district, and right now, it was being concentrated in a space comparable to a musical theater. But as the Nether beyond him writhed and coiled as it struggled to carry the blows, Avo held like a bunker under a mountain.

His mind thundered, but nothing broke. Nothing even fractured.

If Emotions strategy was to perform a siege, then he was sorely overestimating the power of his warmind.

[Fuck no,] Peace said. [Thats Hysteria, I think. The fucking things half-finished. Its only got so many uses before it comes apart itself. Emotions not just going to waste it. Hes planning something. He has to be]

The answer came with a roar of crackling fire.

Traumas went silent, but two-voicesboth screaming at each other, hating each other utterly; completelydrowned all other thoughts out of existence as the Nether came ablaze.

Conflagration. Now!

Avo shed his Delusions. Steam combusted as flame met flame in a jarring clash. As he attempted to devour the other Conflagration before it could consume him, he felt his grasp on his own ego slipping as parts of himself began to pass into the encroaching fire, and vice versa.

[Shit!] template-Chambers cried.

Within Avos mind, his inner-city held firm, but the horizon was a rising inferno rushing to consume them all.

ERRRE_oORR

FNS-r0uo

FReeeuUSSS

KEFUKCKKFUCKYOUUU

DIeeeDKPLEASEFREEDIEFUCKYOUDIEFREE

Colors and memories burst like clouds of paprika. Strain though he did, he could not hold onto himself, couldnt stop himself from melting. Couldnt stop his flames from going still.

The Nether went silent as two flames stalemated each other, both working to consume the other, neither giving an inch in their war of attrition.

The last thing Avo perceived before he fully drowned in the chaos were unnatural eddies forming in the waters of the aquarium past the glass of the ceiling, and how the bioforms were drifting lifeless amidst the currents, collateral damage just as the customers were.

All of them, except the kraken. The kraken which somehow was now sporting a halo of its own. The kraken that was lifting a tentacle, and preparing to bring it down upon Shotin and Kare.