Godclads

Chapter 2-2 Hunted

Why did I volunteer for the Crucible? Because I didn’t want to give the rest of my natural lifespan as some organ farm or debt enforcer to the Syndicates. Why should I submit to the customs of a slave when I have the prowess of a master?

I came from Wan Nan. You know what that means in Standard? “Ten-Thousand Woes.” As in the land of ten thousand woes. Being hunted by some golem jocks was practically a relief compared to the Thousand Plains? Have you seen a Fallen Heaven, sister? Lived in one? It’s not something you can face. Not as a mortal, anyway.

Did I like the Crucible?

I loved it.

It even got me into the circuits. And don’t lie to yourself, the city loves it too. No secondhand thrill like dancing down the edge of the blade, a billion watchers cheering you on, screaming for you to fall.

In the end, we all do what we can to climb the Tiers right? I wanted to see the Arks. Swim up that neon waterfall of the Inner Ring. Go from koi to god. I wanted. I chose. I prevailed. And that’s the only truth anyone needs in New Vultun.

Winner takes all. How’s it been; how it'll be.

-Paladin Interview of Ying Yang Wei, “Stormsparrow” Former Refugee and Freelance Godclad

2-2

The Crucibles. Something between a live-stream snuff vicarity, short-form improv torture theatre, and immigration control. Out of the frying pan of the Maw and into the fire.

New Vultun had an interesting way of welcoming him back into its arms.

From the overwhelming doses of secondhand emotion flooding the Nether, the bloodlust of the spectators was almost tangible. Human emotion, primal and thick oozed over his mind like gauze. He had tasted this flavor in his time as a Necrojack far too many times. Crucibles, after all, were great environments for smuggling mem-data. With a concentration of ghosts that was somewhere north of enormous, the sheer information capacity that any lurking Guilder Exorcists had to sift through to hunt down their quarry was too staggering. A single mind blessed by proper education and intellectual brilliance was already quite the ocean.

Link it to a parapsychic network through streams of ghosts? The scale went from oceanic to cosmic.

Stretch that out across the continent and you had a network built on self-supporting anarchy where the Nether was concerned. The Guilds could have tried to suppress it all they wanted. Short of twisting existence back in time via a universe-sized Soul, the freedom of information was here to stay. Jaus Avandaer made sure of that.

The host continued, her shrill voice projecting cherubic glee with an undercurrent of savagery hinted beneath. +Today, we bring you a new and harrowing tale of survival! Three hundred survivors have been dropped across the Low Umbra of the Underways. Three hundred contestants of all clades, cultures, and capabilities. And three hundred they will remain if they can muster the skill to survive an hour or make it to the checkpoint. But if not…+

Avo could practically hear the announcers' coquettish shrug of indifference. His eyes had adjusted well enough to see the wall he rested against for support. It gleamed, the surface an endless spread of purple hexagonal cells that layered over each other in studded pieces. Nanoduranium laminate. Something that Voidwatch’s deconstructor swarms installed after clearing the Underways.

His Metamind spun. Filtering the patterns of his memory, his cog-feed played a recollection through his mind’s eye. He remembered running from the ever-devouring swarm, watching his more foolhardy brothers dissolve before the tide at a molecular level. How he managed to evade them for those months he would never fully know. The recollection came in stuttered and broken fragments. Much of what he had was lost to stress and age, recorded long before he even had his first Metamind burned into his mind.

From one perspective, Avo was home. That perspective wasn’t his. He left this place before the end of his infancy. The Low Masters were long dead. His kind was broken. The dream of restoring Old Noloth was lost. He belonged to New Vultun now. He belonged to Walton.

Looking to his right, he found himself down a narrow tunnel. Veins of light shrouded the width and height lane he was in. It was like being in the belly of a vast serpent, jaws wide enough to swallow a small building some five stories high and twice again as wide.

+Anyway,+ Little Vicious said. +For all you squires out there that don’t know the way things roll, here’s the jab. Spectating’s free but playing’s gonna cost skin or imps. Interface with one of our mods to pull up our rentable sheathes for you to cast yourselves into. Don’t worry about insurance. We got that covered.+ She giggled. +For those of you that crave that edge-on-edge though, cast us a vicarity showing your most recent kill. Consider it an…audition. We’ll try you out and sign you up. Who knows? You might just be the next Stormsparrow.+

Wasn’t a bad pitch. Down here, even beneath the Warrens, brutality was the way of things. There wasn’t enough room above, so room had to be made. An empty spot in the city was another slot in the lottery. So it went all the way up to the Arks. Still, the audience ate it up with a chorus of excitement and glee. There would be a few hundred thousand sign-ups before the end of the day and from those, the Syndicates would pick the best among the twisted to be their hitters. What could Avo say? New Vultun was a city built on absolutes and extremes. Coming second just got you dead. Winning, on the other hand, just might net you a chance at claiming eternity. Winning let you be a legend, something more than mortal.

A Godclad.

+Anyway, let’s get the blood flowing and the bodies rolling!+ Avo felt the weight of Little Vicious’ focus wash over him–and likely every other survivor as well. +City’s gonna eat well tonight! Let the Crucible begin!+

The bellowing of the initiation horn roared through his mind and deafened his thoughts. Shrugging off the disorientation, Avo fled like a scuttling aratnid, seeking the comforting shield that was darkness. Sliding unevenly along near-frictionless flooring, he took in his surroundings as best as he could. The paths led forward and back. Forward ran up, a slight incline curving him to another level. Back led down and probably into the Maw again. Didn’t want to go back there.

Up and forward it was. Around him, the walls drained away heat and scent from the air through nano-vents. The air tasted clean. Too clean. Voidwatch air scrubbers were second to none.

A cry echoed from ahead. For a second, the smell of chrome and perfume graced him. The scrubbers killed the trail in seconds. Didn’t matter. He was heading up. He had enough dives through these Crucibles to know that these games were built to be slaughterhouses. Lacking an Incognito phantasmic or probably ghost-jammer, anyone could scry his thoughts out and mark his mem-print down within minutes from miles beyond sight.

Stealth was impossible. He needed to move. Take the gambit–

A sudden weight plunged into the depths of Avo’s skull. He grunted at the discomfort of a second consciousness weighing down on his. External emotions and surface thoughts leaked into his own. Whoever was piggybacking his consciousness had linked to him with a very, very poorly sequenced series of ghosts. Studying the strand of ghosts cycling between him and the locus, Avo sneered. The fool forgot to layer the ghosts over their own mind properly, the sequences were all intertwined. They had no respect for the craft; Necrothurgy was meant to be sublime, not sloppy.

+Hey, hey, consang, check it out. I’m inside a ghoul.+ The snorting laugh that rattled in the back of his mind was obnoxious. The fact that he was being piggybacked by what he could only assume was a juvie made his skin crawl. Avo hated juveniles. +Consang, look, look, I’m inside–like, the joke is it sounds like I’m fucking the ghoul–not literally, sis, I don’t actually want to trigger an outbreak of wombrash.”

Contemplating the merits of giving himself a concussion, Avo decided that he rather regrettably needed the fullness of his faculties to survive this. Again, he regretted that he didn’t have the time for a nap to shape his ghosts into function. It would have allowed him to dispel the link at the very least instead of being an open door to every deviant in the city.

As he climbed to the top of the tunnel, the path ahead broke off into one that curved left while another shot right. Through the right, an opening led out into what looked like a factory. Inside, he saw and heard the rumble of working machinery. Industrial lighting. This close, not even the scrubbers could suppress the smell of the dead.

+Wait–wait, shut up, man, the ghoul’s trying to think. Oh, shit! What’s it gonna choose? What’s it gonna choose? Go right. Go into the plant, rotlick. Come on! Go fight some shit. Don’t be a half-strand!+

Sadly, the idiot was probably right. The contestants who try to run the clock out by circling the outside usually get picked off easily and early. The Crucible was entertainment, and no one liked “half-strands” who didn’t want to die. Self-preservation and avoidance made for low viewership numbers. Crucibles were not games of stealth. Again. No hiding from the ghosts without the proper phantasmic engrammed. Definitely no hiding for him now that he had a watcher leeching from his consciousness. Even if they left, he was certain someone else would inevitably jump in.

No. The best chance is to ride the periphery of the chaos. Be close enough to the danger where everyone was distracted by the ongoing killings to hide that he was in fact, apart from it.

Stepping past the threshold, Avo immediately found himself inside what looked to be the lowest level of a factory. A wight manufacturing plant to be exact. Something meant to recycle corpses into undead servants.

Before him, thousands upon thousands of implanted, modified, and restitched corpses hung festooned from top to bottom of four slowly spinning cylinders of immense dimensions. This factory must’ve been centuries old considering the rust on the metal and the groaning servos. Still, it worked, transferring more and more bodies upward to transition them to the next stage of mass-industrialized undeath.

Stepping out onto the plasteel walkways cupping the walls of the plant, Avo studied the cylinders as they rotated the bodies upward through a narrow gap. He must be on the bottom. Where all the bodies are dumped and where the salvageable ones get sorted. Above was where they would be sorted toward different functions. Avo had a wight back in his hab-cell in the Undercroft. It cleaned the apartment pretty well. Did most of his orders too. Guess it probably came from a place like this.

Home. Cell. Safety. Life. He missed it. Missed his old Metamind. Missed being able to control himself. Hated being at the mercy of the beast. Hated feeling like a ghoul. He wanted to go back–needed to get back before this month’s tax came due. But he probably needed to locate where his old Metamind was before that seeing as it contained his FATE-ident and other documentation items.

The bodies kept spinning upward. He noticed that all of them were missing scalps. The micro-locus implanted inside the skull in place of a working brain proved to be the most expensive part of the entire package. Without a locus simulating the functions of thought or something like a cloned mind, there was nothing to anchor the ghosts.

Avo was about to proceed when he heard the scream. Heavy feet scuffled along laminate flooring, the steps echoing from the tunnels behind him. A sudden slip. A gasp. A loud crash of fumbling bodies and a crack. Someone wailed. A child.

The stench of blood and sweat struck Avo. The air scrubbers didn’t reach far enough into the factory to halt it.

+Oh! Oh, shit! That’s–that smells fucking terrible! Stop sniffing you fucking dipshit, I can taste it too! Not everyone has your blood-piss fetish! Fucking rotlicks, man.+ Avo ignored his piggybacker and shot a quick look down the tunnel.

Some feet away, he saw them: a child dragging an unmoving man, his form face down against the wall. The language the child spoke and pleaded in was rapid, unceasing, and lyrical. And completely alien to Avo’s ears. Could be anything from Sangshanese to Yeshti. Without his old Omni-Lingua phantasmic, he couldn’t tell.

A smear of blood trailed down the wall, to where the man lay. The sweat, meanwhile, was mainly coming from the child. The little one continued to pull at the downed man desperately. In the overlay of Avo’s cog-feed, both of their minds sizzled raw like naked yolk on a skillet. Within their cores, he saw the echoing ripples as well.

Then, just past them, Avo caught sight of a signature of thought-stuff and echoes rising from far beyond. It was slow approaching, rising from far down the tunnel. This time, Avo smelled more than just blood and sweat. This time, he smelled the sting of chrome.

A new noise intruded on the scene. The wail of something slicing through the laminate. Focusing his hearing, Avo caught the unmistakable hum of a frequency blade. Heels clicked up the tunnel, the footsteps of the hunter proceeding at a leisurely stroll: no hurry; all certitude.

+Hunter!+ cheered the piggybacker. +Here we go!+

A spray of thoughts washed over Avo’s. Intrusive excitement and bloodlust stained his mind.

+Two-hundred and fifteen survivors remaining!+ Little Vicious declared. +New Vultun's a thirsty city tonight! Am I right or am I right?+

Well, that was fast. Avo expected the slaughter to happen, just not so soon, and without any fanfare. How far apart had everyone been scattered? It didn’t matter. The Low Umbra was once a sprawl of tombs half as wide as the city itself. The others could have been anywhere. He needed to leave before he got added as a death statistic.

Avo wanted to turn and walk away. That was the smart thing to do. Climb up the factory. Get out of this mess. Just flee through into the processing wings and take a chance there. Instead, he just found himself fixated on the boy pulling at the unconscious man, trying to get him up. Avo had killed four people earlier. Failed to save the slaves. Got his mind nulled and sold into a Crucible himself.

Walton would not have been pleased.

Sensibly, he should flee. Leave them behind. They were dead weight, entirely devoid of any obvious implants or mods. Avo couldn’t remember the last time he saw a pure flat in New Vultun. Even the probable indentures he ate back on the barge had ad-tats and some bone lacing.

Instinctively, he wanted to eat both the boy and the man. They would be easy meat to swallow, and he needed the energy. And deeper still, the beast wanted to hear the man scream while he ate the boy. Imprinted cruelty was hard to repress.

Ultimately, however, it came down to a simple question. A question Avo often asked himself when he didn’t know what to do next.

What would Walton do?

Avo knew the answer, and for the millionth time, wished that man’s standards had been ‌a bit lower.

He re-entered the tunnels much to the hollering glee of his passenger. He kept the distant thoughtstuff of the approaching hunter in the corner of his eye and gauged them to be approximately fifty feet away. Interestingly, the hunter seemed to lack a Metamind as well, seeing as their surface thoughts were flooding out unsequenced into the Nether, spilling and fragmenting constantly like a dissolving puddle.

Thankfully, the bend of the tunnel blocked them from sight so at least they couldn't just shoot him.

As Avo’s shadow fell over the child, he watched the little flat freeze and turn to stare at him. The beast inside wanted to eat the boy. He strained against the urge. Not a child. Never a child. A child couldn’t choose. And choice was sacred. Those who couldn’t choose were off-limits. Walton’s rules.

Bright, deep green eyes blinked at him on a face that was dark as coal. Tears and snot marred the boy’s chubby cheeks and round chin. His skin held an almost rubbery texture to it; a porous quality that seemed to adjust based on body temperature. Not so flat after all then. Or perhaps the child just belonged to one of the various minority clades that came pre-modified by the gods before the fall.

The boy looked up at Avo, wilting in fear at a monster made manifest. Avo stared at the boy like one would an exotic snack. The beast inside him fanned the flames of his urges. He wanted to know what it felt like biting into that skin, the taste of the flesh beneath. Darker yet, he wanted to see if the boy would fight him if provoked. That would be amusing.

Wasting no time, Avo took a look at the nonfatal cut along the man’s midriff, considered the strong heartbeat in his chest, and noticed the bulging on his head. Assumption: a fall had rendered him unconscious. Which meant Avo was now trying to save a clumsy fool and his child.

+...Eat the kid! Eat the little fucking slip! Come on! Eat him!+ Avo went back to ignoring the freeloader in his mind. Of course they wanted to encourage him.

Another sound came from deeper down the tunnel. The boy’s eyes widened in terror. Avo frowned.

“Lit-tle bo-oy. Come back. I just want to show you my kn-ife,” The sing-song voice came from below the curve of the tunnel’s path. The boy reached out muttering something. He clung to Avo’s undersuit pleas on his quivering lips. Avo didn’t need to understand him to know that he was begging for his life.

Avo bit back a sigh. He was going to do something stupid. He was going to do something very Walton. “Get off.”

The boy blinked. Avo tried not to growl. If he was going to save the man, he needed the boy out of the way. As he reached down, the boy shouted defiance and, to Avo’s disbelief, bit him. Soft teeth gummed against leathery ghoul-skin. The boy blinked. A dull amusement bubbled in Avo.

Shaking the child off, he lightly backhanded the boy across the jaw, the child’s modded skin absorbing the impact evenly. Like a collapsing deck of cards, the child flopped off his father and onto his side, eyes watering in shock and pain.

Fixing the boy with a glare, Avo held a clawed finger up to his lips before bringing it down across his throat. The boy stayed silent, by fear or understanding. Reaching down, Avo threw the father over his shoulder with casual ease. Lacking implants and being close to baseline meant that man felt like a feather, despite Avo having only one arm. The man would need a two-thousand more pounds of mass before Avo started feeling the strain.

Motioning for the boy to follow, Avo comforted himself knowing that if he was about to get run down by some horrific monstrosity, at least he’d die protecting an idiot and his loyal offspring. Somewhere, the impossibly idealized image Avo had of his adopted father would look upon him with pride.

Somehow, that was enough.

The boy chittered something at him, motioning behind them.

“Asking the monster you just met to fight the monster you’re running from?” Avo said. The boy just repeated the same noises. Avo missed having an Omni-Lingua. Or even a cheap ThoughtScanner sequence for his ghosts to pattern.

The boy followed, chattering while the hunter drew closer, their heels clinking louder with each step upward. Avo had no idea what he was dealing with. For all he knew, he could be facing someone with a military-grade Accelero implant and would find himself dead in microseconds.

The boy made more noise. Avo got the bulk of what he was saying already. Help us! Help us! Avo leaned the father a few feet away from the tunnel’s entrance and left him, impossible to miss. The walkway was barely large enough to fit the three of them, anyway.

“Wait here,” Avo said. The boy just repeated the same noises. Avo pretended that was a yes.

Phantasmal noise crackled in the back of his head again. +Yo, consang? I think this ghoul’s helping the kid. No. I’m not shitting you sis! Come over.+

Looking out across the plant, Avo considered his options. The chamber ran on for a near-mile. Machinery and rust lined the walls. Bodies still poured out from chutes built into the four corners of the room, piling on conveyor treads still served by spherical grime-coated drones. The drop from the walkway was a good eighty feet. Survivable for him but not the other two. Even he would probably sprain something. Walkways led down from both the right and left, but he didn’t want to test his luck in a sprinting match.

Whoever his hunter was, he gave them good odds of having some kind of reflex booster. If it was anything above civilian grade, he was going to be slower than them. Pair that with a frequency blade, and he would put good imps on the hunter peeling him apart before he could blink if this was to be a straight fight. He needed to approach this from a different angle, much to the whining bloodlust of the beast.

His nature demanded that he throw himself against his adversary with fangs bared and fury flowing free. His desire for self-preservation offered better options: flee or ambush.

Looking at the chamber and the lack of cover, fleeing was going to be hard without catching a flechette to the back. His goal was to get on the cylinders and ride it topside. Couldn’t do that with someone chasing him–

Avo noticed how well the gaps on the walkway fit the curving talons of his prehensible feet. There was also the missing railing on the sides to consider. Avo grinned to himself.

Ambush it was then.

Avo spun around and studied the boy.

“Cry,” Avo said, doing his best to mimic tear trails with a single hand. The boy stared at him confused. “Cry–Crying. Water from eyes! The thing humans do.” A sniffle came. A sob. Avo let out a breath of relief. Thank Jaus for little miracles.

Stepping over the edge of the walkway, Avo dropped down to dangle off the side before looping his claws through the gaps in the walkway. Bringing his feet up, he clambered into position upside down as he positioned himself near the inner wall, where it was harder to spot him.

+Oh–oh! Fuck, man! Consang! Come here! No seriously! Cast into the ghoul, man! The ghoul is doing some strategist shit! I’m not fucking with you! I’m not. Just do it.+

Another voice manifested in the back of Avo’s skull. This one was nasally, but just as juvenile. +I swear, if you’re doing this to make me blow my imps–why the fuck are we upside down?+

+Ghoul-guy is about to do an ambush. About to do some ambush-shit. Grettin’ ready to flip upways and fuck a hunter in their exposed a-a-ass.”

Avo gritted his fangs. Looking down, he counted a good fall. “Going to drop headfirst. Splatter myself. Don't want to hear either of you talking."

+Whoa!+ the nasally one said. +It speaks Standard real good too!”

+Smartest ghoul,+ the other one agreed. +Like saying, the–the cleanest ass.+

They laughed in the back of his head, snorting with immature glee. Letting go and falling headfirst to his death had never been so tempting.

The rattling sound of someone stepping onto the walkway drew his focus. Finally. Time to see who was to become prey.

A thin, twitching hunter emerged above him, her body littered with so many implants and ad-tats that she was more metal than meat.

As she stepped into the light, Avo knew that he had made the right choice. Ghouls were monsters compared to flats; could tear through dozens with ease. For someone with the right implants? Ghouls just belonged in the corner of a snuffer’s HUD with the rest of the kill-tally.

Today, though?

Today he intended to make her part of his.