Godclads

Implants don’t make a Regular. Weapons don’t make a Regular. Not even training makes a Regular.

Regulars are made through trauma. Through experience. Through fortitude. The kind of fortitude that no amount of cog-conditioning can replicate. The willingness to adapt to any kind of physical alteration made upon their vessels and the stability to bear extensive neuro-modifications.

Through these trials and tribulations, what is already raw steel can be shaped into a proper weapon.

To call them hammers would be too limited. To call them scalpels belies their capacity for damage. To call them soldiers betrays the purity of their service.

So, if you think you have what it takes to be war incarnate, focus here to stream your details to your nearest Highflame recruitment center…

-Highflame Nether Ad, “So You Wanna Be A Reg”

2-7

The Right Kind of Broken

His savior approached with the caution one might take treading toward a minefield. Fusing his spine back together using his cells, he waited for the prickling to spread through him and return the use of his limbs. He couldn’t even remember when Slaughterman broke him. He remembered drinking the hunter’s echo even less.

IGNITING THAUMIC CYCLER: 8 thaum/c

A scant foot across from him, the gargantuan hunter lay still, the contents of their half-mechanized brain spilling across the war-mottled ground. Avo didn’t receive a ghost this time. Wasn’t much of a ghost to claim seeing how ruptured his cognition was from the makeshift ghost bomb.

Transferring a slapdash explosive made from raw trauma was a desperation trick. Wouldn’t have worked against even remotely competent memory-wards. Thing about wards though: without a Metamind, they’re more a cage. Directly rigged to your base-mind, they’ll tear up your psychology and bleed protective memories into your own. Schizophrenia is a common byproduct. As is anxiety.

Cheap products always incurred hidden costs.

+Fuck,+ Little Vicious snarled, her voice cutting through the room. +I knew it! I knew you were with the fucking Reg! You’re a lucky half-strand, ghoulie. Lucky, lucky little shit. Put good imps on Slaughterman snuffing you. Good imps now lost. Oh, but this isn’t over. Not even close. See you soon ghoulie. You and her both.+

The public broadcast snapped into silence as he felt Little Vicious’ presence depart. Avo felt a growing tension replace her. This was the second time the host of this little playground of horrors mentioned a Regular. Eyes fixed on the frequency blade approaching him, he suddenly wondered if he was about to take another trip down resurrection street.

If he was dealing with a Reg right now, then his life was pretty close to forfeit. Saying a Reg didn’t like ghouls was like saying an exterminator took issue with aratnid infestations.

Shadows shifted across the floor. Avo looked up, momentarily distracted from his potential murderer. The father and his son emerged from their hiding place, bodies stale with sweat, heartbeats decelerating.

The Regular moved, cutting the two off in a sudden blink. It was like they were in one place, then another. A gust of wind splashed over Avo. They had moved faster than he could perceive. Had an Accelero Frame-flex implant the least.

Not even Visekeles seemed that fast earlier.

The boy chittered something at the Regular. They didn’t respond immediately. Instead, there was a shuffling noise as they walked over to stand over Avo. The Regular had mag-boosted running blade transplants instead of standard legs. Explained how they moved so fast. The edges of their “feet” were rimmed with gore and glinted with a simmering heat.

With a simple nudge, they flipped him over with a kick, uncaring how their bladed legs burned him. Avo didn’t mind much either. Not while he was already hissing from the agony ebbing through his back.

Staring up at the ceiling, the Reg’s face remained shrouded in brightness, so shrouded by the light that they stood a towering shadow, their holocoat projecting waterfalls of grey around their torso, masking their physical frame.

Slowly, with blade at the ready, they leaned down.

A rough-faced woman came into view. Her hair was knotted in a thick coiled braid that disappeared past her right shoulder. The shape of her face was hard; sharp cheeks matched with a square jaw. The jagged claw scars running down her eyes were probably more statement than injury. It didn’t take much to strip scars from tissue. Avo knew those scars too. They were the type one would get from a ghoul’s claws. Likely earned in close quarters down in the Underways. Down in a place like this. Somewhere far from artillery and air support, with things collapsing into a desperate melee.

Something about her told him she didn’t much care about the lack of support. It was in her eyes, the absence of softness or worry; no fear, only focus.

The holotags dangling from her neck swayed through the veil of her coat. The tag’s design drew him into the embrace of memory, prying him ever so slightly out of pain's grasp. They were marked with a many-eyed creature bearing eighteen burning wings and a serial number. The Highflame insignia. Definitely a Regular, then.

Still, what was an official Guild operator doing in the Crucible? The strength of her heartbeat interrupted that line of questioning. It pulsed once and then stayed silent. Across the length of seconds, it stayed quiet. Every sinew within his body was flooded with worry.

It was uncanny not being able to hear the heartbeat of a human. Something that made them feel like something more than prey.

Of course she had an enhanced circulatory system. Maybe even respirocytes in her blood instead of just an augmented pump. Maybe a full Nanosuite. Whatever she had boosting her systems, it was far superior to the cheap chrome so commonly used by the chaff in the Warrens. Strangely, her Metamind was a simple single-ringed halo compared to his. It had a spiraling set of intersecting wards that cycled through memories, switching them between layers of lanes.

Avo frowned. He knew that design. Ori-Thaum. Oruboro-class. Required twenty ghosts to run at baseline. Probably ate up ninety percent of her cog-cap.

That told him two things. First: she was definitely not a Necrojack. Second: her relationship with Highflame had to be something special. Ori-Thaum was the rival guild to their ambitions. Somehow, he couldn’t imagine the two sides mixing products, even if it was pragmatic.

As he studied her, so too did he notice her studying him. Her expression was cold and blank. Her molten-gold eyes glared down at him with an inscrutable intensity. The cold war of silence persisted between them. Neither wanted to give ground.

From her perspective, what was there to say to a monster, who ate the innocent in the name of the Low Masters. From his, what words did he have for an old killer, whose extermination squads massacred a billion of Avo’s kind as a lesser backdrop to a greater war? Between them, what was there to say to an old enemy, who doubtlessly lost allies and kin to each other during the Uprising?

Not much was the answer.

Avo still remembered the dreams he smuggled from former Regulars in the Nether, the canvas of their midnight delirium painting screeching hordes of ghouls feeding themselves into kill boxes held by drones, artillery, golems, and soldiers; flashes of claw breaking against hyper-auged soldiers shrouded in nano-armored combat-skins.

The ghouls were made to be expendable monsters.

The Regulars were made to be far more than mere soldiers.

They weren’t equals. Not even remotely.

“Why haven’t you shot me yet?” was what Avo wanted to ask the Reg. That required more sentiment than he possessed.

“Dead?” Avo asked instead, flicking his eyes at the mutilated corpse of Slaughterman.

Her expression didn’t change. This entire time, her eyes didn’t blink. “You already know.”

Yeah, he did. No heartbeat. No breath. Last spills of thoughtstuff mid-dissolution. No coming back from that.

He expected her to drive the blade through his skull now. Deliver him back into the embrace of death. Instead, she stared on, frozen in thought and indecision.

“Sword,” Avo said. “Mine. Want it back.”

Her lip twitched. An incredulous look flashed across her face.

If only their former masters could see them now.

As she ignored him, her body remained uncannily still as if a statue rather than a person. The only thing that gave away the frightful speed at which she operated was her eyes. They slashed across his body by the microseconds, the faint glow to them indicating that they were entirely artificial.

Hells. Not even her skin was normal, seeing as it left no scent.

She was a walking absence in the room. No taste. No fear. No smell. Nothing that indicated she was prey. The beast hated it. Avo hated it but found a measure of amusement as well. How fascinating it was to deal with someone who fell beyond the parameters of your biological design.

She turned, her movements impossibly precise, calculated. She angled the right half of her face to face the boy and the father standing next to the door while keeping Avo in her periphery.

“A ghoul saved you,” she said, the rasp in her voice sounding like a leftover from years of yelling. The father nodded, eyes wide. He shot Avo a grin. Avo stared at the ceiling, pretending to not know the man. He would have kept doing that even if he wasn’t paralyzed. “Tell me, consang: are you pissing down my back and claiming it's rain?”

The smile evaporated from the father’s face. “I…”

Her head whipped back over to Avo. The way she moved was almost snake-like. One place and another. No move-continuity. “Do you go by a name? Or still by master and number,” she said, switching to perfect High Nolothic. She spoke the tongue as clean and fluid as any Low Master did.

Avo scoffed. Martial elite indeed. Highflame sure poured a lot of investment into a single individual.

A deluge of memories drowned Avo’s mind in violence. He remembered the Regulars. Remembered how they purged his brothers, sending squads of six or fewer to clean out entire megablocks. Remembered how their guns shredded his ilk, never missing, every shot maiming, crippling, killing. Most of all, he remembered the hopelessness when it came to fighting them.

Master and number. He was number forty-forty. He was the forty-forth hatched from his bio-nest. As for the Low Master that owned him…Walton had taken those memories away. Said they served no need other than being shackles.

Another beat passed between them. “No,” Avo replied, speaking Standard. She didn’t look like she was going to kill him. He still expected her to. Maybe some part of him even wanted it. It would have been poetic. “Got a name: Avo.”

She just stared. “Why didn’t you eat the boy? The father. You saved them.” Still using High Nolothic. Did she want him to use his birth tongue? He wouldn’t. He rejected it. Same way he rejected the culture that birthed him.

“Diet,” Avo answered. “Don’t eat those who don’t give reasons. Don’t eat the choiceless.” She looked like she didn’t believe him. Didn’t matter. It was the truth. "Why spare me?”

Her lip twitched; a flash of amusement lingered in her eyes. She changed back to Standard. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, consang. Haven’t spared you yet. Just never met a ghoul that wasn’t a nudist.” Her eyes cut down toward his abdomen. “Your sacrum’s shattered, amongst other things. Ligaments are a mess. Kidneys look like paste too. Your brain looks fine, though. How long is it going to take you to heal?”

Avo grunted. “Three days. If I risk tumors.”

The Regular sucked on her teeth. “Don’t got that kinda time. You’re up or you're dead.” She studied him again and tilted the frequency blade at him. If she wanted to cut him, he probably wouldn’t even see death coming. “You got fight left in you?”

Avo barred his fangs. “Ghoul.”

She nodded. Her Metamind spun. Behind her eyes, a battle raged. Two choices lay before her. She could cut him down and move on. That was the simpler choice. The other, stranger choice probably led down the road to his survival.

“Necrojack,” Avo added. “Can jack minds. Was jacking a mind. Till you stole my kill.”

She shot a look at Slaughterman again. She tiled her head. “So. That’s what his twitching was about.” She frowned. “Speakin' of: how the hells did somethin’ like you become a Necrojack?”

Something like him. Avo sneered. “Ate the right brains.”

He knew better than to agitate her, but he couldn’t help himself. He was good at his craft. Walton made sure of it. Not everyone could implant or mod away all their deficiencies like a Guilder.

Her lips thinned as her irises came alight. She was scanning his injuries again. A thoughtful look came over her. “Yeah. You’re the right kind of broken for this.”

He didn’t know what she meant by that. Suppose it took a certain kind of person to be a Regular, a certain kind that didn’t have all their baseline thoughts in sequence. Whatever she was thinking, he’d take it over dying.

From beyond the obfuscating veil of her holocoat, she produced a single injectable. The tip of the needle glinted clean in the light, but what caught Avo’s attention was the tiny fetus of a canid floating in the proto-amniotic barrel.

“What’s that?” Avo asked.

“Woundhound,” the Regular said. “This’ll hurt.”

Story of his life. Avo wanted to shrug. He settled for growling when she forced the needle through his abdominal wall and speared it into the broken fragments of his partially mended spine. His blood bit at the intrusive needle on reflex, trying to disassemble it. Not fast enough. She pressed down on the plunger. The dog fetus slipped through the cleft of his wound.

Behind her, the father looked ill. The son’s eyes grew wide.

Inside, Avo felt something take a literal bite out of his injuries. It fed from him, licking up the pieces of his spine, replacing the damage with restorative healing. He felt nips tickle across his body, and other nicks and hurts drained from his body. Something lurched beneath his flesh. Avo shuddered. Twitched. The snout of a growling dog pushed through the walls of his stomach, his skin distending as the creature began to swim through his biomass like it was pawing free from the surface tension of a pond.

As the woundhound detached itself from Avo’s clinging sinews like he was a gateway made of watery flesh, a sense of euphoria spread through him. His prior agony had vacuumed empty of his vessel, replaced by wholeness. He felt his arms and legs again.

Shaking its red, ragged fur, the woundhound pulled itself loose from Avo, panting loudly. Avo gazed upon its form and found it to be comprised of his wounds; a mangled living effigy made of his injuries. Columns of broken spine and shards of bone swirled across its fur-like constellations. The lesser wounds also orbited in its wake.

It was a good seven feet across and wide. It nipped at the air and eyed Avo with a tilt of its head. He felt a faint connection to it as if he had fed it as a mental leash connecting it to his Metamind formed. Right now, he could feel its only desire: all it was waiting for was for him to tell it to go “fetch.”

After that, it would dive into the flesh of another, and square the debt of his wounds into a new vessel.

It sat next to Avo. Halted at the entrance to the maintenance hall, the father and the boy just stared, wonderment and horror blended across their faces, trying to comprehend how the dog came to be.

Living beyond the walls of New Vultun probably meant anomalies from Ruptures and Fallen Heavens was probably commonplace items for those two. But still, true thaumaturgy was still a deviant sight to behold for the eyes of merest mortals.

The Regular offered Avo her hand. The fingers were still flesh. Callous and natural, at least on the surface. The woundhound growled at her, inching up next to Avo. He sent it a thought and ordered it to heel. It whimpered. Her lip twitched. “Dog’s not going to be fast enough. Take your head off before you can sic it.”

She wasn’t lying. She killed Slaughterman faster than he could perceive. An alpha-grade reflex implant will do that: make you ten times as fast as a flat. Still meant she was four times faster than him. He doubted the dog would even touch her if he let it loose. His best advantage against her was still his skill in Necrotheurgy, but he needed more specialized phantasmics to deal with her wards. It wouldn’t be just smuggling a makeshift bomb into her mind via a communicative link.

Wordlessly, Avo took her hand. The beast inside him imagined whipping a claw across her throat, slitting her arteries, and slipping his tongue through the cleft of welling blood. His rational mind imagined the last sight he would actually behold would be his ascending body as his head toppled from his neck.

Stained with his warring desires, his woundhound growled. Avo bite back his urges and glared at the dog. It whimpered and went silent.

With a casual tug, she dragged him to his feet as if he weighed nothing. He rose, finding himself a foot taller than she, but her bulk considerably thicker. Just her forearms alone were thick with enhanced muscle. Unlike the slithering eel-like organs he had inside him, hers were like taut bowstrings. Through her skin, he could faintly smell the carbon of the nanofibers.

She clutched his hand tight. “Draus.”

“What?”

“My name. You’re taking point. Stay ahead of me. Don’t lag. Don’t do funny shit. You stay straight and narrow and maybe I won’t snuff you.” She slid his former frequency blade down past the veil of her coat. Then, she extended a hand again, offering him a curve-barreled pistol. It had a layer of lenses running down the center of the barrel, fused in place by a lattice of cheap plasteel. An auto-laser of some kind was his best guess. “Don’t bother turning that on me none either. Don’t got the stopping power. And you don’t got the pace.”

Avo frowned. Strange that she was giving the gun to him. It was built for her hands, so he could barely get his fingers around it. Still, it felt awkward in his grip. Like there was too much weight missing. “Never shot a gun before,” Avo said. “Nearsighted. Ghoul.”

She shrugged. “It shoots itself. Got a smart-aim system. Link your ghosts to it and point to where they tell you. Then squeeze. Don’t jerk.”

“Better with sword,” he said. “Why not just return my sword? You use gun.”

She snorted. “Functionally, you’re slow. Likely, you’ll just drop it again. Presently, you can’t take it from me.”

All good arguments.

Avo accepted the gun. The weapons detail began interfacing with his Possessor Phantasmic.

Mirrashard-0227 Auto-Laser Pistol

An ammo counter manifested in his mind’s eye. Twenty charges left. Currently tuned to burst fire. Chlorofusion cells were still operational. Generating one charge every five seconds. Useful.

Another frown graced her face. “Still haven’t told me how you got to be a Necro. How you got that Meta.”

“Don’t know,” Avo said, half lying. She didn’t need to know about Walton, and he didn’t know enough himself about the Metamind.

“Real box of mysteries, ain’t you?”

For her and him both. He didn’t even have any ideas about how he ended up in the Maw.

Her eyes went dark; no more scanning. She motioned him to head down the walkway from whence she came, past where the father and the boy were huddled. Avo shrugged and accepted. Better odds than facing all the hunters alone.

He crossed by the father and son and noted their uneasy expressions. They had no idea what to make of the Regular either. Probably didn’t know much about the Uprising. As they trailed behind, he felt his woundhound nudge them out of the way, snarling. Father and son obeyed. Faintly, he could feel the dog in his missing injuries, like it was anchored to his wounds. It felt strange, but anything was better than being crippled.

“Direction?” Avo asked.

“Getting out of here. Heading for an old corpse delivery station connecting up to one of the blocks. Need to get a mile and a half up before we beat the game, and enter the Warrens proper. That or we can kill the rest of the hunters.” The Regular shot the father and son a look. “Well, maybe we could do it. Puts them at risk though.”

Avo tried to hide his salivation. Part of him knew this to be unwise. He got lucky with one and nearly got snuffed by the other. Would’ve been his death if he didn’t get tricky with his Meta. Might’ve even still gotten killed if Draus didn’t come in when she did if Slaughterman managed to keep his mind together for another second.

Still. He couldn’t deny that he wanted this. He hadn’t fed from live prey in years. He missed the thrill. He missed the taste.

He noticed that his cog-feed was screaming again. Close to overcapacity again. He sighed. Ejecting those ghosts was a necessity but had left him with less to work with. He disabled the Ghost-Link and cast his consciousness forward as a Specter. It would prevent him from being ambushed within a fifty-foot radius.

Peeking back at her, he watched as her thoughtstuff was contained like a pallid nodule at the center of her oscillating wards. No other phantasmics to speak of. No active scouting on her end. Definitely not a Necro, that one. Relied more on getting things done in the material. He guessed her wards were good enough, but he expected something more robust for her mind. If he had his original phantasmics, he definitely could breach her mind.

“Specter?” she asked.

He grunted in acknowledgment.

“How many.”

“One. Only got fifteen ghosts for my cap.”

Twenty-two. But what she didn’t know was in his favor.

“One’s good. Just keep it ahead and around and not on me. You catch a scent or hear a sound I’m gonna ask you to make that ambush-screech your kind used during the war. Remember which one?”

He shot a look at her. Another uncomfortable silence. He hated how much better she was at weathering them than he. He knew which sound she wanted him to make. The noise had never left him. It came to him when he was sequencing his own nightmares, sometimes. Watching your brothers get massacred by fire and metal tended to engrave the memories pretty deep.

“Yeah.”

“Good. Keep going down maintenance. We’re gonna take a left somewhere up ahead, cut through this madhouse.”

Avo acquiesced. After all, what was there to say to an old enemy, made a companion of convenience through this game of death?

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