Chapter 28-4 Nullification

Chapter 28-4 Nullification

+PRIORITY APEX THOUGHTCAST INCOMING+

Attention all active Mirrors (classification Convex and Concave). This message is from the Inner Council:

All operations are to be discontinued immediately. All cells are to adapt defensive stratagems. Shuffle your teams. Make your Sleepers go dark. Delete all memories stored within your proxy minds.

Approximately eight minutes and fourteen seconds ago, a series of ruptures opened at once within our districts. We have sustained severe infrastructural and personnel damage in the Nether and the material realms. Preliminary inspections have found no traceable mem-data or evidence left on site. However, existing precedent has detected parallels between the current attack and operations conducted against us by the High Seraph Veylis Avandaer herself.

This information is unconfirmed. You are not to mention or impart these details to anyone else. You are only to collect the proxy minds and mission-related memories from all assets under you.

[DEEPNAV MARKER ASSIGNED]

After gathering all intelligence marked classified, you are to remove all existing memories from the minds of your assets and loci. Thereafter, you must arrive at the designated DeepNav marker within twelve hours and submit your collected details on-site. Failure to do so will have you marked as [COMPROMISED] and will result in an enforced extraction.

After this, your own memories will be cleared, and you will be made to surrender your current role as well. The suspension of your responsibilities will be temporary. Correspondingly, you will be assigned a personal Heaven of Information for further protection. You are not to inquire about why these measures are being taken. You are not to acknowledge or interact with your assigned Golem in any capacity.

Finally, our prototype Heavens of Culture will be activating across all districts. It is recommended that you all return to your communities and clans in the near future. You are to remain inactive until receiving new orders.

Unity is destiny.

+THOUGHTCAST SESSION LOST+

-Ori-Thaum Inner Council

28-4

Nullification

–[Avo]–

“They are approaching. DO YOU HEAR THE [CALLS].” The Techplaguer skipped between Avo’s ethereal watchtowers like a fish bursting from the surface of a pond, dipping its antennae into passing wavelengths over and again. Bound to the Heaven of Signals, Avo could indeed hear the broadcasts of the Omnitech Knots.

He already had [4000] golEms mem-locked. The evolved Definement of Synthesis granted him perfect attunement with minds and matter. His ghosts were now beyond even the metaphor steam—utterly transparent as they slithered across the Sunderwilds.

His Definements of Empathy and Delusion had merged, becoming the Definement of Synthesis. Across the Sunderwilds, his being pooled out as transparent threads, framing all that existed within the context of his memories. His ghosts were more than mere steam now; they were entirely invisible. Invisible until Avo willed them to be otherwise, and then came a tinge of contrast—the void's absolute black lined by the gleam of a burning Soul.

At Sphere Seven, his influence over reality was grander in scope and vulgarity. Reality was simply easier to bend to his whims. As ghosts casually stretched across out like a web that encompassed continental distances, his phantasmal watchtowers only amplifying his resonance.

He was already pooling over the 4,000 golems he tracked, his mind encompassing their beings—a colorless membrane they would never be aware of. Nonsensical numbers and ordered patterns danced from the Omnitech Knots, their Heavens of Signals speaking to each other, communicating across the tapestry using pulses of unnatural radiation and wavelengths. They were approaching as a concert, their Porters lining the Sunderwilds with easily traversable pathways for the main force to follow.

The vanguard came in from all angles, using the Scar Charts to bypass the geometric hurricane, the unnatural waves of the Shattered Sea, the flesh-infecting light, the matter converting echoes of sound.

They came for both the enclave and the Heaven of Winter, but within Avo's estimates, they were going to reach the latter days before they ever got to the former. Just as well—they wanted the Sleeper's fragments and probably assumed it was an easier target to take.

Assumptions had most fatal consequences in war.

REND CAPACITY - 99%

+How are we playing this?+ Draus said, already recovered from her overwhelming union with the gestalt. The Arsenalist was already painting firing solutions from each of Avo's watchtowers. With a few more reflections, she would be able to perform an ambush. With Avo’s awareness and her Heaven and skills, they would stand a chance of destroying quite a few golems.

Quite a few wouldn’t do.

[Rent Capacity at zero. Overheaven Pattern-Nullification updated.] The Agnos cheered as she scouted the Sunderwilds using Avo’s sense. Nothing there. It worked. Four thousand iterations of tests and it worked. She squealed. [We’re going to strip time itself clean. We’re going to poison the paths!] Loathing leaked from her mind, and she thought of Veylis.

A few additional shivers ran from pattern of space. Avo observed the tapestry, and more Domains began to react sporadically in places he could not fully perceive, in corners of darkness, in light, in matter, and more. Additional Knots were likely hidden. Additional Knots that he would not be able to find without devoting additional resources or effort. But they were hiding now, holding in place.

He'd bought himself some time with the feat he just performed. The other Omnitech assets likely weren't sure what he just did, and paranoia would keep them pinned longer than the rest of his defenses. They would probably proceed even slower now. Bring in their own hyper-esoteric Heavens before beginning their engagement.

For now, Avo found himself satisfied and magnified. But he wasn't done. He assigned Kae new tasks, things she needed to work on. The Strix Upon the Empty was an immense Heaven unto itself, already requiring 825,000 THAUMS to run at only a canon and a Hell. The sheer scope and vulgarity of its miracles were beyond peer, but he had more thaums to assign, and more canons to create.

Veylis was still his superior. Considerable superior. That could not be the case if he desired to win this struggle.

He needed even stranger canons. Something capable of striking across Spacetime—something easy to deploy and destructive on an unfathomable level.

Concepts filtered over from Kae. Presently, she had an idea about converting ghosts into solar fusion. Avo had a great many ghosts. And for an additional Hell... a direct upgrade to his Woundmother’s Breath of the Withered—a metaphysical sun with its light infused with entropy, capable of fraying matter, force, time, space, and concepts where its brightness reached.

[Jaus,] Abrel breathed, mind going blank at the prospect of facing Avo. There was no hope for her. No hope for her family. Soon, he would stand alone among esteemed company within New Vultun. Esteemed company, and a great power unto himself—made even greater by the gestalt.

His Overheaven’s shape began to change in the void. An aesthetic evolution followed his apotheosis. The Strix sprouted free from his Overheaven, and his secret project merged with his growing being. No longer was he merely a burning nest of Soulfire, wards, ghosts, and tattered dragons. No, that was merely the core of his new self—a singular eye burning upon the skul of a vast Strix. Trails of eldritch fire outlined the contours of its being, and its every sinew, every plume and feather was sculpted from an ethereal midnight glow — ghosts embodying the hollowness of the void. From within the dark came tendrils. Tendrils of purest white growing free from sequences and whips of gliding darkness. The visage of his Echoheads returned once more, but ghoul was long gone.

The midnight rains began to wash over New Vultun once more. As the water fell hard from the higher clouds seeded with vaporous miracles, ugly tears stretched across New Vultun. Scars raked across reality from the Tiers to the Warrens below. Between the fractured seams in existence were flashes of nuclear detonations, were thoughtwave detonations, were spatial thresholds forming battle lines between districts and Sovereignties.

The Guilds were frozen. Left stunned after what Avo inflicted upon them. The Strix had bought him the most valuable commodity of all: time. Time for them to spend entrenched as he worked and shaped every advantage he could for the forthcoming trial. Time before they could properly respond to him, to come up with any of their own countermeasures.

He needed to make the trial count. He needed to steal Kae back while he could—snuff Veylis if he could.

There would never be a moment, an opening like this again.

{Avo,} Calvino said, the EGI’s voice echoing across his subminds. {It’s time.}

He shifted his consciousness to the submind he assigned to Threshold. In the Avalon server, the mists above began to clear as waters rose. Upon a small boat, he kept to his mortal avatar, though it was increasingly a lie when compared to his Overheaven. He and the EGIs were far more than matter. But they still greeted each other this way for the pretense of their polities. For those born of the flesh and saw no further than what their senses offered.

The waves beneath his ship stilled to a ground of sapphire blue, and voluminous clouds around him formed a coliseum, sectioned seating devoted to all the polities. There were millions of minds in attendance, millions of avatars to sift through. Threshold accommodated them presence by adjusting their distances to him in real time. Those he viewed in detail were drawn closer, made to be no four meters away for dialogue. He himself was always at the epicenter of this place, the beast of the hour.

A synthetic dawn made from nanomechanical particulates rained over Avo. Like a crown hovering over his head, Calvino’s avatar rippled as they spooky. {This special assembly has been called to session. Polity minds; alliances; confederations; cultures; remnants, I give you Avo, Operative of Aegis, the Burning Dreamer, now Ark and God of Mortal Origin.}

Alarm flooded his Definement of Hysteria. Alarm. Moments from the past drifted over him. Wars still beyond his comprehension. Shots fired years in advance, traveling for light years before punching through critical habitats or worlds, killing trillions, breaking entities of Soulfire infused within anomalous alloy.

For millennia after, Voidwatch had survived the end of their universe. The end of the old ways. Now, here they were again, faced directly with a god—or something like it—enduring memories of a war that never truly ended.

Avo empathized. He knew what that was like.

+Thank you,+ he said, addressing Calvino. Turning his perception on the gathered many, he sighed, and began his address. This would not be for him, but them as well. Them. Their polities. His gestalt.

And a proper future.

+Voidwatch. Minds. People. Sophonts. I have come to demand your rejection. I have come to command your disgust. And I have come to severe you from hope. I am all that you fear and more. And I am the final legacy of your enemies. The inheritor of their war.+

{Avo,} Kant muttered, firing him a tight-beam hyperwave broadcast. {What are you doing?}

+I am here to make the truth known,+ Avo said, ignoring the EGI. +And I am here to greet you with honesty. I am not like you. But then again... most of you aren’t like each other as well.+ He paused, and a chuckle escaped him. +You really shouldn’t be together.+