Her head toppled from her shoulders.

  When her killer picked up her disembodied head and pced it so that she had a good view of the city, saying that he was sorry, that it was for his family… Only then did the reality of her betrayal sink in. He’d been bought by the same scum who had turned her home to radioactive gss.

  Krahe. That had been her name.

  In the moment her head was severed from her body, a of Dead Man Switches embedded in her cyberics went off. Among them, turning her body into an autonomous humanoid on was the first. The loews cycle that night ran wild with reports of a rampaging “cyber-zombie”.

  As the man who she had trusted and who had betrayed her met his end at the radiation-bsters embedded in her arms, the sed of Krahe’s Dead Man Switches went off.

  The rotten, corporate heart of Megacity Gamma, and with it the HQ of the Whitestone and Bergmann Financial Group… It all went up in nuclear hellfire. Such was the scale and resilience of corporate megastructures; nothihan a fusion bomb would have sufficed. The megacity’s intra followed whe Dead Man Switch activated: a self-replig AI was unleashed, running rampage through any system even slightly reted to Whitestone.

  These were the treasures of a woman who had lived through corporate wars and cataclysms without number, who had stood against the closest thing her world had to gods.

  The three curses of a righteous warrior whom her own world had rejected.

  Brunhilde Krahe died with the image of a nuclear fireball of her own making, burned into her artificial eyes’ eas. With the st shred of backup power in her head, the cyb rumbled out her final words.

  “I. AM. NOT. DONE…”

  She died filled with regret and refusal, for this was a se she had never wao see. The only reason she hadn’t dohis of her own volition, why this was a Dead Man Switch to begin with, was the knowledge that the true masterminds of Whitestone would just prop up another finance group in another city with even tighter corporate security.

  “It was all for nothing…”

  A truth she could not accept, hoping even unto death that her act would at least stir another like herself into a. She hoped that eventually, the subhuman parasites behind the likes of Whitestone would be strung up from their own ivory towers as they rightly deserved.

  Those who had killed her thus met the same fate, even if she was not there to see it. No, Krahe had loed for the timeless jourhrough the ic void between worlds, only to be snatched up by the whims of ic bsp;

  Amidst the vast emptiness of the void between worlds, a sciousness stirred; a being as a as the worlds of man, those motes of light which speckled this boundless nothing. It heard the call of a defiant soul cut down on the cusp of greatness, a soul which so vehemently rejected its owh that its cries echoed across the ic void of Kenoma and stirred obog from its timeless slumber.

  obog was called many things. A god of ruin. Misfortune. Apocalypse. It was no such thing.

  A god of ego, ambition, the peaceless search for ever greater heights. These, it was a god of.

  It snatched the errant soul, binding it within itself, and drifted back to its ageless sleep. An eon passed, over the course of whi infinitesimal shred of obog’s being seeped into the soul of Brunhilde Krahe. It was an infinitesimal fragment of the Old God’s knowledge and power, equating to less than a drop of water amid a bottomless o, a singur grain of sand in a boundaryless desert.

  In the subterranean capital of a civilization long-gohere stood an a holy site, now desecrated, turo the boratory of a madman. The stern faces of fotten kings and gods looked down upon a sorry dispy: An old, once-great man desperately squeezed the venom gnd of an arm-sized, mprey-like worm into a syringe. Filling it the rest of the way with blue-glowing elixir from a beaker, he ied himself with its tents.

  The terrible pain which had wracked him was carried away on a f wave of numbness, the innumerable bulging seams of his pieced-together form reg into no more than lines on his skin. His mind grew foggy and the beaker slipped from his grasp, smashing on the brass-inid floor.

  “At this rate, I shall lose myself before the year is out… e on Audu a hold of yourself…” he thought, listlessly gng about. All this maery, all this equipment. It was all worth a fortune, and it had utterly failed him in trying to awaken the a city’s maery.

  That wretched substahe venom of a Baneworm, was the only thing which could suppress his affli, born from turies of careless fleshgrafting and self-experimentation. Oh, how he hated his younger self for disregarding the warnings of those who held the grafting arts in reverence. He had thought that his raw genius would allow him to just deal with it ter, that he could use alchemy and magic to achieve immortality through brute force. The reward for his hubris was a body actively trying to pull itself apart, a body that could not be saved even by the highest masters of the grafting arts, or so they cimed. His brain was being dissolved alive by the same venom that kept his symptoms under trol, his mastery of alchemy the sole reason he wasn’t yet a vegetable.

  He go his right, to his writing desk, and he reached beh the vast sheafs of paper, pulling a gun from underh it all. It was beautiful, a tury-old work of craftsmanship that still stood head and shoulders above modern firearms. Audun took a clip full of rounds and pressed it into the gun, w the ringed lever o its trigger to chamber one. He sidered taking the easy way out, albeit briefly.

  Akaso