Whatever came over John, or rather Artos puppeting his body again, was something unthinkably awful. She had never seen them express emotion like that, the hundred eyes dotting their right limb weeping blood and staring with an unmistakably animal fear and desperation. It was… human… so unmistakably human that for a moment she forgot who it was inside that body.

  She didn’t know what exactly was going on or what Artos was asking her to really even do, but to the best of her ability she fulfilled their desperate plea. Even as razor-sharp wire bit into her flesh, even as the body went disturbingly limp in her hands. The only thing that was holding back the dread that she had done something terrible was the fact she had a battle to focus on and the distinct smell of warm life still coursing, albeit weakly, in their arteries.

  It was so tempting… she hadn’t eaten for hours…

  It was honestly a mercy that the chaos of battle absorbed her mind right after. It had not been long since she had first tasted human flesh, indulged in some primal savage instinct in a moment of panic and weakness, and while not exactly unbearable the memory had been itching in the back of her skull ever since. The Sword Saint had famously of course butchered and served the masters of the Bloody Citadel to her fellow gladiator-slaves, but it was less the act itself and more how it had nothing to do with necessity for her case. She craved it because it felt good, raw delicious power warm with fresh life.

  It was a reminder of everything she hated about her father. And now that she had learned her mother was awful in her own unique way, she had been having uncomfortable thoughts about her own future. Was she cursed? Was she doomed to become, in some way, like one of her parents? A roving brute little better than the warlords the Empire sent him to violently suppress and devour, or a narcissist absorbed purely in matters relating to herself?

  Faced with such thoughts, she simply threw herself at her foe harder, drowning it out with the certainty of violence and the struggle.

  Several beams of rusted steel slammed into her, one particularly sharp bit actually managing to pierce her skin drawing black blood and sinking perhaps an inch through her steely flesh. Grabbing it and wrenching it out she noted how weird it felt, for lack of a better word it was almost half-real much like the stuff they saw in that endless wasteland dimension beyond the gate. But the longer it seemed to stay in her hand the more real it seemed to become, the colour shifting to a more saturated hue, its weight and texture more coherent with her own expectations for a length of rusted metal.

  She did not have the luxury to ruminate much further on the implications of the matter before it lifted its mangled arm and shot a beam hot enough to burn through metal and stone at her. With her speed she managed to get mostly out of the way, but a nasty burn still emerged on her side, even her natural heat resistance doing little against such heat.

  Reacting quickly she attempted to disappear out of sight again, as with how things currently stood she had little chance to get a direct shot at her foe. There were just simply too many options the thing had to keep her at bay, those deadly spikes and their potent venom could likely prove deadly on a direct hit, and with whatever sorcery it was performing with the ring as well as the beam it was likely it didn’t even need to use them.

  The air shimmered around her as she attempted to use some of the abundant debris for cover, head pulsing with strain accumulated from overtaxing of a brand new psychic mutation on top of blood loss and disrupted meridians from her stint in prison earlier. Later she would look back on this and find it almost funny how she chewed out John for his own self-negligence. Birds of a feather did seem to, indeed, flock together. Right now though, it was the din of her own heartbeat in her ear, the stench of rust and blood, burning pain telling her that she was still here and she had to keep moving.

  A massive wave of debris knocked her right back down right before she could manage a decent swipe, a large cinderblock slamming into her head at great enough speed to shatter it immediately. She realised that the dust and grime was sticking to the blood coating her body, while she could change the colour and texture of all things made of her or woven with pieces of her own body there was indeed a limit where the distinction between her body and foreign material became too great to ignore.

  “You have been most troublesome. What a waste of good material, but I cannot be delayed any longer.” Her foe spat with annoyance.

  She tried to stumble back to her feet but found her body frustratingly unresponsive. A coppery taste was pooling in her mouth, weakness and shortness of breath. She had pushed herself too far too quickly and not given herself time to recover, for the Curse killed the very essence of a living thing and no amount of regenerative prowess born of its power could seal the cracks it wrought.

  Strangely she wasn’t afraid for herself. Her thoughts were filled with her friends… what would become of John and Gorekin and even Faith? She was always too strong for her age, born of a man who knew only violence, she had known deep in her heart that this was the only way it could have ended. But to fail to save the last person from her old life, the few people she found the strength to fight for… when she returned to the Spirits what would she even say to them?

  She had no time to dwell on that morbid line of thinking, as a strange blinding light lit up in the background of her blurring vision. The sigil she realised… the Prince’s gift.

  Was that… her mother?

  In the brief moment when the homunculus was distracted she saw an opening and drew upon reserves she did not even know she had. Her organs were boiling inside of her, her bones screaming inside her body with every movement, yet her eyes remained fixed on her target. With a violent lunge, she fell upon her foe like a starved Mauler, tearing at the strips of flesh remaining and even into the metal beneath. Her own blood mixed with the foul rotting taste of preserved flesh, but even as it tried to stab her with toxic tentacles she would bite into the stingers and venom sacs, her enhanced iron-clad digestive system proving far stronger than even skin, scale, metal and muscle.

  Unfortunately, the thing did not in fact require flesh to survive, and with a violent spike of agony, she found a sizable hole blown in her side by a desperate shot from its cannon. She tried to continue to push on, even managing to bash the offending weapon beyond use, but on top of the damage she had already sustained it was too much.

  Once more she braced herself for death, before a crimson tendril whipped out from the rubble and dragged her out of a killing blow.

  “Thank you. You have done enough now.” John, no… still Artos? Said as her vision continued to blur. One of his eyes was missing, likely burst in the chaos when those tendrils were ripping out of him, small silvery wires still visible writhing around in the space of the eye socket.

  They spat out a thick slurry of healing slime and poured it onto her wound. Already her regeneration was fighting with the Curse, enhanced clotting ability warring with damage to her blood. The paste seemed to skew this battle slightly towards her favour, not negating the damage, but giving her more of a fighting chance.

  A deafening sniper shot rang out from a pile of rubble. Gorekin, having apparently managed to dig himself out, was using the chaos and debris to his advantage. The furred giant proved shockingly well hidden even to her senses, and surely even more difficult for the mauled machine to spot.

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  Sliding almost like a liquid from some hidden crack Faith emerged. “By God Cobalt! Stay still- by the grace of God if it were one inch further left I would hesitate to say even I could fix this!”

  “Take care of her. She needs to rest, and we are nearly done here.” Artos said. Shockingly human-like too, it was genuinely hard to tell if it was John or Artos in charge if not for the persistent monotone edge and his curt sentence structure.

  Faith nodded and pressed her hands against her wound, warmth flooding her core. There was a strange itching that followed as flesh began to slowly but surely stitch together at the margins of her injuries, necrotic tissue sloughing off in waves of pink-black slurry.

  Sure enough, she could hear footsteps approaching, reinforcements and a lot of them. Likely an entire platoon of Cultivators. Indeed, this fight was nearly over.

  “Massive systemic damage detected… error: systems failing. Coolant leak- processing… redirecting protocols…” The homunculus screeched mechanically. Like steel scraping against stone. “PRIORITISE PRIMARY MISSION AT ALL COSTS!”

  With shocking speed even on largely ruined limbs, it lunged towards the gate, and with a glint of the ring on its stolen finger, she knew with a sinking surety things were not over yet.

  The situation seemed to have been far worse than what they had anticipated. If what Tom said was true, and while she knew Saha to be a consummate liar she knew he more than made up for her lapses in truth, what the enemy was searching for was already nearly within reach. Only a small group of Cultivators stood between them and the secret the Machines were fighting bolt and nut for. Not merely access to the mysterious network of arcane Golden Age relics which apparently linked the old American Empire together like a vast web across space, but the key to opening its gate.

  Now was not the time for skepticism. She burst forth another group of scouts from her central cavity birthed this time from a set of tumours she had circulated an otherwise wasteful amount of Si into. Fuelled by this extra power, her remote eyes scurried forth with uncanny speed, and quickly she found her target.

  The wave of psychic disruption was still present, but with the higher levels of investment and seeming weakening of the field, she could still see with acute clarity the shitshow on the lower floor.

  It was just like Tom said… a metal skeleton visibly not the boy they had detained on suspicion of being a machine infiltrator was locked in battle with Saha’s girl. It was honestly a little hard to imagine the vicious cultivator she saw came from the womb of eel-like Crane, but the taste of the blood did indeed not lie, and she could recognise the desperate flames of raw survival that first drew her attention to the little street-gang leader all those decades ago.

  As she looked closer she saw in the last bits of rapidly disintegrating flesh hanging off steel bones the countenance of Marcus, and her heart sunk. How long had he been replaced? With none of them any the wiser, how great was the ability of the machines to access the memories of those whose bodies they defiled? This mockery of life… vile and disgusting on a level she in her centuries of life could scarcely imagine.

  And as it stumbled, as it was pushed to its limit and seemed ready to crumble at any second, she saw it push forward straight towards the gate with wicked intent.

  “We’ve wasted enough time.” She determined. She would not wait for Bluescale any longer, nor was there any point in conserving energy. Decades worth of accumulated power was not worth allowing this shame to persist any longer.

  Flooding the ball of plasma she had summoned with her deepest reserves, she pushed it through the floor melting straight down to the lowest level. Rock and steel alike gave way as she carved a path straight down, dissipating it only to hop down herself and allow her forces to follow.

  A significant deviation in her cultivation, acrid blood spilling out into her twin tongues. Her mind was slightly desynced, two streams of consciousness running at once, but united in common purpose this mattered little right now.

  Emerging from the ash and debris crawled out Saha, coughing up plumes of dust as her once pristine white scales were soaked in grey. “Fisher? Thank the Great Spirit…”

  She had no time to waste for a reply. Summoning several balls of plasma she got ready to completely annihilate the imposter until not even ashes remained to speak of this shame.

  Unfortunately for her, as the lightning arced through the ionised air, she realised too late the reaction her Si was generating with the eldritch technology of the ancient gateway.

  A continual spark from the arm of the monster became a blinding bolt of lightning, and gravity itself lost its grip as a hole was torn asunder between the boundaries of worlds.

  John was… nowhere again. This ruined landscape of rust and wreckage, he still had just about no idea what it was. Not entirely physical for sure, he was nearly certain he ended up here because he was knocked out again somehow, but physical enough for others to have travelled here too and to translate the strange distances here into tangible movement in reality.

  He was never much the scholarly type, having only delved into books in a vain attempt to answer what exactly ARTOS was. Idly he thought about what Alexander would have thought about that. Before the mere memory would be so uncomfortable he would banish it out of his mind, but now he felt strangely numb, almost mechanical. He felt as though he could see things more objectively than before.

  He took on the man’s name and felt he owed it to him in a sense. And indeed, Alexander had been like a father to him. But at the same time he never really understood him perfectly either, born to power and choosing to walk away from it, he never really understood the hunger that had defined John’s existence since the day he glimpsed a glimmer of a freedom that was never meant for him. He was always so concerned about his actions, concerned about what was happening to him, Cobalt too was victim to the same. How could he expect them to understand after all? Maybe the other Rats too were fine with living their life, and he certainly knew that they would likely never face the pain he pushed himself through now on a regular basis. But for him, once he had a taste of no longer being helpless, an impotent bystander to the injustice of the world, it was impossible to even imagine any other path no matter the costs.

  Here, in the numbness, an ephemeral not-quite body like a shadow against the world, he felt small once again but in a very different way than ever before. What was he now? Right now he didn’t feel very human, was this how ARTOS felt all the time? This cold detachment, a secondhand account of his own emotions. The only thing truly real was the silent contemplation of his immediate surroundings and the unknowable implications of this silent graveyard.

  Several small holes opened in reality, dragging in piles of debris. He didn’t seem capable of being dragged out with them, for some reason it seemed in this spirit-like state he was more or less stuck here. There was a vague hint of something, some unseen cord he could feel at the edges of his being tethering him to something beyond, but whatever tricks ARTOS used to get out of this place he was not aware of.

  Come to think of it, it did not make sense for ARTOS to be sent here either. As far as he could gather the symbiote was as alive as he was, with a mind based in his arm very much on the physical plane. So what then was this place?

  …was this even a place for the living? The Corpse Mountain looming in the distance, utterly silent despite his presence and barely noticeable without him putting active effort into acknowledging its existence as it always was when he arrived here in his unconscious, seemed to point towards that troubling implication.

  But he was alive, wasn’t he? He felt alive, and certainly, he wasn’t seeing any other spirits around. And he had been here before and come back, so that couldn’t be it.

  He hoped he would remember this train of thought, perhaps when his emotions came back to him he would find some way to make sense of all this. Actually, last he was here he was more emotional, wasn’t he? He didn’t recall much, but now that he was here there was a distant tugging at the edge of his recollection telling him that he felt more… normal… then.

  If he was feeling less human here, was ARTOS feeling more human down there?

  He didn’t have much time to think further on the matter, as a blinding light from an inactive archway below told him that he may have the chance to ask in person sooner than expected.