Cal sat into a workbench mutating into a polyp of steel and plastic. The eyes of his five companions glowed with psionic power.
Irel stared at the bright azure line she’d drawn on the ground in awe. It no longer projected a visible barrier. System had elevated it into a higher order psionics, allowing the separation of concepts.
Jaud had awakened eyes of blazing green that reflected concepts of creation. She hurried to Cal’s side and placed her scanner glove on his bloodied arm.
“I’m not sure how to phrase this, but…” She frowned at his eviscerated middle section. “You’re dead.”
“It is a mild inconvenience,” agreed Cal. An increasing portion of his existential mass was being spent on maintaining the Law. “My body requires patching before Law healing.”
“I should note that neither my training nor assistant AI programming cover resurrection.”
“What did the System name your ability?”
“Vector creation.” Jaud extended a syringe from her fingertip. A leaf-green glow coated it. “The summary claims I’m able to synthesize psionic vectors that temporarily aid or hinder the target’s natural processes. In other words, I can create drugs and poisons?”
“If that is how you interpret it. The exact definition will be in flux as your psionic identity solidifies.”
“Ah.” Jaud paused awkwardly. “My hope was that the creator of this System could elaborate on the explanations, considering I am about to poke you with this.” She wagged her glowing finger-syringe at him.
“Make him talk! It’s about time Cal spilled the beans.” Private Orlsen appeared behind Jaud’s shoulder. Her eyes glowed pale pink, signifying a cross of aptitudes between emotional and sensory concepts. Her hand had been mangled by recoil, and her now triangular pupils were dilated by Jaud’s painkillers.
“Turn the pressure on that cursed Fate demon! Make him pay for the suffering their kind put us through!” Paimon slurred through heavy anesthetics. He had awakened with dark purple eyes bearing a fractal swirl reminiscent of the Unhorizon of Beyond. Curious. Cal had never heard of a man called Paimon traveling outside reality. They would speak of this. Later.
“Alsssso…” Paimon leaned into Irel. “Don’t tell him I said that, alright? This’ a secret. That’s the trick, yo usee. Never disrespect Fates in their face and you can get away with a whoooole lot of nasty shit. Hehehe…”
His face bonked against Irel’s new barrier, triggering her drugged giggles.
“I apologize on the behalf of my squad,” said Sergeant. His new cybernetic arm was the only one that had endured the Law-amplified recoil.
Cal dismissed his concern with a wave.
“Begin with my abdomen,” he instructed Jaud. “Familiarize yourself with repairing my digestive system, before fixing vital organs.”
She let out a nervous exhale, then focused on the syringe. Hume levels around the needle-tip thickened. Cal watched it poke at the scraps of his small intestine. Green fluid made the veins glow where it spread. Slowly, blendered flesh began wiggling together.
“Ah. It’s… they’re assembling wrong. How do I–”
“Existing psionics can be dismissed with a thought. Focus,” advised Cal.
Jaud closed her eyes. Three breaths later, her psionics flickered out of being.
“Continue,” he urged when she hesitated.
Jaud’s brows creased. She injected his guts with a different vector. Beads of sweat gathered. Hume levels around her needle-tips wobbled between vanishingly weak and her entire existential mass, but through trial and error, she grew familiar with manifesting her psionics. As the treatment patched Cal up, the burden of the Law preventing death began to lessen.
“How exactly did your System make us psions?” asked Sergeant.
“The real question is, how the fuck are they psions without grafts?” added Irel.
“Yeah! Hoooowww?” moaned Private Orlsen, eyes squinting at Cal. “Caaaaal, how’d you do this? Don’t lie, I see through lies now, through funny color lies. Lies gotta be one of these colors. I bet it’s purplblue? Purblue.”
Cal’s gaze drifted to the lamp polyps. This was yet another opportunity to practice his hobby of narration. A hole in the left lung would make his voice a croakier, but he could take advantage of it to affect the voice of an old wizard. Such a voice would impact the tone of his story, but if he reframed Empyrean as a young heroine, it could work.
But first, he spoke a Law.
“Spying is forbidden.”
Cal’s hume levels dropped by five.
A camera short-circuited in the corner of the room, a psionic presence dissipated from an insect in the corner, and, though he tried to hide it, Paimon twitched from pain. Cal cast him a gaze that suggested for him to begin composing his confession.
Paimon stared in the middle distance in a daze.
“It begins,” said Cal with a rich and ancient timbre spiced up by a punctured lung, “as stories of our age so often do, with the Empyrean known to you as Stargod. You know of course of how she granted a fragment of herself to save a woman she believed her friend, of how that woman awakened psionics, of the pilgrim wars where half the Earth begged her to heal self-made wounds in hopes of power, of how her infinite kindness diminished her so low that the first friend could strike her down, claim her spine, and crown herself…”
He trailed off as Jaud injected her psionic drugs into his broken lung.
“Pardon. Cough for me,” said Jaud.
Cal coughed out phlegm and blood.
“Good. Thank you, I’m moving to your heart. You may experience discomfort.”
Cal cleared his throat and continued, his voice now slightly less wizardy, “...and crowned herself the Queen of Europe. You know this and the story of how the first psion became the first Hive Queen, when her humanity could no longer bear the weight of the foreign power within her grafts. You know of her desperate search for a sane Hive Queen, for a way to heal herself. You know of the wars that came in the wake of the Africa and Siberia. You know how mankind did what mankind does when they find new power. We fixated on it like a drowning man, thinking godhood lied just one more graft away. We made science of the mutilation of her corpse, and in so doing, doomed ourselves to tragic irony.”
A jolt of psionic drugs pumped filled his heart with fire and ice. The organ thumped.
“Congratulations,” said Jaud. “You are once again clinically alive.”
“The Empyrean fragments are not the source of psionics, but pieces of the Beyond – amplifiers and crutches. Though potent, they are ultimately a trap.”
Cal left them with the question. He waited and let it stew until the moment it was unspoken on all their lips.
He answered, “Mankind never needed grafts. Only guidance to awaken. True psionics lie in recognizing the aspects of your soul, understanding your deepest being, and embracing it, thus manifesting your soul onto reality as a Domain.”
Cal pointed to his halo, his Crown.
“The System is my Kingdom, my Domain, though I have forged it beyond its natural form. It assists you on the first step of your psionic journey by guiding your soul through the initial steps of the awakening and in further developing your powers. In exchange, I receive your excess existential mass, which grants me certain tertiary benefits, such as the ability to maintain an increased number of Laws, and eventually grant boons to those my Crown deems worthy.”
[Kingdom]
[Awakened: 5][Knighted: 0][Ennobled: 0]
[Law slots granted: 1]
[Maintenance: 5 humes]
[Contribution: 4.3 humes]
[Net: -0.7 humes]
“Cheat! You said there was no drawback, but you’re taxing us some humamas,” accused Private Orlsen. “Humama… Hums!”
“Hume, a unit of existential mass.”
“Hume! I said Hume!”
“You would be more familiar with the concept of the psionic mass,” explained Cal.
“You don’t deny it, huh. Stealing our humamas!”
“Shut it, moron. He ain’t stealing,” hissed Irel. “It’s rough controlling your mass. Hell, even Hive Queen’s bleed off over a half of theirs, warping all this shit.” Irel kicked at one of the mutated workbenches. She chortled, incredulous. “This System is straight up hand holding kiddy tutorial wheels by comparison. You’d be frying your brains without this.”
“Oh. Tha–”
“Double tutorial wheels, with three hand holders,” stressed Irel. “Look, look at Jaud! The bitch is regenerating flesh after what? Minutes of awakening?! Took me years to make my barrier stable without backlash fucking me over and now…” She drew a line on the floor, laughing a hollow laugh. “Wham, I’m a tactical class psion. Maybe upper tactical. Ridiculous.”
“So I shouldn’t be mad?” Private Orlsen tilted her head. “Cal did good?”
“If I wasn’t on a suicide mission, I’d be kissing his feet, doing that all hail.”
“They lure one in with gifts and promises,” moaned the still very-much drugged Paimon. “They say they’re helping you help yourself, but know you are a mere pawn in their schemes.”
Jaud stabbed Private Orlsen’s, Irel, and Paimon with psionic concoctions in rapid succession. The pupils of all three sharpened. Their expressions shifted from relief to realization to shame and horror.
“Uh, sorry about…” Private Orlsen stuttered, blushing. “I didn’t say anything too embarrassing, did I?”
Irel turned away, beginning a loud and completely unrelated conversation with Sergeant.
Paimon threw himself into kow-tow before Cal. “O’ Allking, Fate of Law and Mercy, please pardon the sins of your most humble prophet! Devilish drugs of the mortals possessed my tongue and despite my heroic attempts to revere your glory, I misspoke…” on and on he went.
Cal dismissed him. “We will speak of you later. Are everyone’s wounds set?”
“All ready,” reported Jaud.
Cal dropped the Law that forbade death and declared healing instant.
Wounds vanished, replaced by dizziness and thirst.
Field rations and water flasks were passed around. Cal sought a functioning terminal from amongst the warped seashell-like computers. He dismissed the Law that prevented spying, bypassed Xcore security with the admin password and started tracking down the person who had accessed the corner camera.
To speed things up, Cal spoke a new Law, “Hiding is forbidden.”
His new hume maximum of 32 did not budge. They wanted to be found.
“So,” Sergeant sat down beside him. “What is our plan for when Europe kills your enemies, takes the Heart, and creates another Hive Queen?”
Cal noticed the camera moving again. “Merchant and Priest have Knight. Alongside Dragon, he is the greatest combatant of us all.”
“Someone better than you? That’s a…” Sergeant suppressed a face of disbelief. “Difficult to imagine.”
“He defeats me nine times out of ten.”
“Good thing you can forbid violence,” Irel chucked. “Eh? EH?”
Cal pursed his lips, initiating a tracking program.
“EH!?”
“EH?!” added Orslen.
“Knight limits himself through psionic Oaths. The power they grant him scale in potency according to their restrictiveness and the hope they inspire. With the correct Oaths he can negate a wide variety of my Laws, and we are– were…”
Cal paused. Did betraying one another weaken the sworn brotherhood of millenia, when they both knew they might need to slay one another? No, he decided. A battle to the death would not undo their bond.
“...are brothers. He is familiar with my limits and strategies. I must know his Oaths to stand against him, and I am willing to pay a price for the knowledge.”
A message prompt popped up in Xcore’s internal communications app. Cal clicked it. The messenger’s avatar was that of a young Xcore scientist with bright smile, styled red hair, and a titled black tricorn hat.
Carmine Grabheart: “Bd-5, residence 36, by 4:27.”
6:30. Fourteen minutes to traverse three floors warped beneath Europe’s domain. That would leave plenty of time for him to go spectate Hive Queen’s meeting with Knight.
Cal swiftly drew an avatar of a radiant crown in painting software, created an avatar, and typed a reply.
ALLKING: “MY GREETINGS TO YOU, ROGUE. CEASE HIDING BEHIND MARGINALLY PUNNY PSEUDONYMS, THEY DO NOT AMUSE ME.”
Carmine Grabheart: “...”
No further reply. Cal redoubled his efforts.
ALLKING: “YOU HEARD MY ASK. NOW SPEAK OR I SHALL SEEK ANOTHER TO NEGOTIATE WITH.”
Carmine Grabheart: “And you, dearest Ally, should know that typing in uppercase does not convey power. It is the mark of an elderly with poor eyesight and limited technical intelligence.”
ALLKING: “I PRONOUNCE YOUR INTERPRETATION OF EXISTENCE AS FALSE.”
Carmine Grabheart changed her username to RogueTakesAll. She yielded unusually quickly.
ALLKING: “IS THIS A TRAP?”
RogueTakesAll: “A cunning one that will end your doom.”
Cal nodded and made a comment to the Sergeant, “Rogue rarely agrees to meetings without trying to end you once or twice.”
Sergeant remained silent, though his mouth moved occasionally.
ALLKING: “MEET ME ON THE SURFACE IN TEN MINUTES. THERE WE SHALL DISCUSS UNDER THE RAIN AND DEATH.”
RogueTakesAll: “I shall have to decline. However, my offer stands.”
ALLKING: “SUCH COWARDICE BETRAYS YOUR WEAKNESS.”
Slowly, Sergeant took a seat nearby and leaned against his palm. His eyes stared out into the far distance.
Private Orlsen strolled by, glancing at the conversation over Cal’s shoulder. She made a face of regret and confusion.
ALLKING: “YOU DO NOT POSSESS THE STRENGTH TO REACH THE SURFACE. I NAME YOU ROGUE THE WEAK.”
RogueTakesAll: “Bd-5, room 36, by 4:27. 2 oaths.”
The chat history vanished.
Cal leaned back in thought. Bd-5 room 36 was near her awakening location.
“Worth the risk?” asked Sergeant.
Cal stood and set towards the exit. “She knows the Knight’s Oaths and more. However be warned, Rogue possesses the ability of absolute thievery. Should she touch you, you will be at her mercy.”
“No? What?” asked Orlsen.
“How absolute are we talking?” asked Irel.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
“She may steal steel’s properties, a room’s oxygen, or the appearance and body of another, but she won’t be able to steal space or time yet.”
Orslen snorted. “Yet. Nice.”
“Engage at a distance. Apply all Hive and psion precautions,” Sergeant said.
Soldiers acknowledged and discussed precautions. Cal studied their faces. Smiles, confidence, determination. They spoke as if the Fountain would not become their tomb.
“Got something on my face?” asked Orlsen, blowing a strand of hair from her nose and fixing it back under her helmet.
“You do.”
“What? Is it a smudge?”
“Courage, madness, and beauty.”
“Oh… Ahm…”
“Come, Rogue awaits.” Cal led the way.
Footsteps splashed on seawater puddles. The ceiling dripped. Cables twitched underwater, swaying like algae. Ahead, something disturbed the water, silencing the group. Behind a corner, abandoned tunnel scooters twitched, eliciting a twitch-reaction from the soldiers behind Cal.
“Hold,” hissed Sergeant. “Ambient Hive warping. Harmless until provoked.”
Orlsen’s eyes glowed pale pink. Triangular pupils studied the former scooters, widening. “They’re afraid. Like babies. They’re alive?”
Cal kicked off the transforming scooters and tore down a wall of light-fixtures turned to coral, revealing a jammed blast door. The keypad no longer worked, but a starsteel dagger and liquid metal muscles did.
He struck the door. Metal dented with a groan. His knuckles bled, revealing bones coated in Nervefiber. Data streamed in the System. Is suggested benchmarking. Cal approved.
“Don’t break what I just fixed,” groaned Jaud.
Cal unloaded a sequence of body-weight strikes at the door. Lock bolts loosened. Seams began to gape.
[Thought-to-action response time: 65ms]
System reported a slight communication delay between Nervefiber and Liquid Muscle, due to the latter’s hasty integration.
“Loud,” noted Orlsen with alarm. “We could be drawing attention.”
“Doubt not the whims of the Fates,” regaled Paimon. “For they alone know when to strike and when to insert the key.”
Cal gathered his momentum into a spin and drove his heel into the compromised structure. Two blast-doors tore apart. Dead mechanisms sought to close. Cal drove his fingers into the crack and pulled. Crackles ran down his arms, up his shoulders, and across his back.
Liquid steel hardened. Nervefibers flexed. Human bones fractured. Blood vessels burst. Muscles tore and ligaments frayed. Iron coated Cal’s tongue. Pain up in his arms. Teeth clenched, he tore open the broken blast door.
Slowly, the reinforced alloys bent outwards. Cal released them with a sharp inhale.
[Body enhancement factor: 8.2 baseline]
Pushing past 7.4 times baseline damaged his underlying human biology, despite Nervefiber protecting the bones.
Cal beckoned Jaud. She stabbed him with a syringe. Pain subsided. Muscles and tears knit back together under psionic regeneration.
“All good there, Cal?” asked Orlsen.
“The performance compensates for lost reaction speed.”
“Wasn’t… yeah ok.”
Onwards, puddles shimmered dimly with warp-flora fluorescence, granting the hallway the appearance of an alien leviathan’s digestive tunnel. The soldiers flipped their tactical visors down behind him.
Footsteps splashed and cloth rustled in the dimness. They had a moment before trouble.
“The System will guide your psionics development, but it won’t teach you how to utilize those abilities,” said Cal. “Opportunities to prepare, such as these, will be rare in our journey.”
A moment passed.
The visor of a tactical helmet hissed open. Pink eyes glowed in the dark. Orlsen yelped, stumbling.
Sergeant slowed his gait.
“I’m fine. I’m fine! I can actually sorta… maybe? Noonnyeess?”
Sergeant offered her his hand with a commanding grunt.
“Thanks. Sorry.”
“Keep up.”
The two continued following Cal and others.
“Can you guys try to feel something? Something strong. I see you all pulsing, smudging colors on the world.”
Cal revisited his most treasured memory with Empyrean.
Orlsen let out a small gasp.
“Psionic perception is often poorly suited for direct combat. A second spent interpreting its revelations may be one you cannot afford. Dismiss the temptation to overanalyze. Trust intuition.”
“Right…”
Irel was testing small barriers with taps, seemingly testing the impact of hume investment with System’s guidance. Jaud had likewise adapted to her changes. Paimon was of course familiar with his psionics.
“Mr. Toven. Thoughts on optimal combat use of my abilities,” asked Sergeant.
Cal gestured for him to speak.
Sergeant explained his aptitudes and ability.
“Endurance is defined by its limits. Instincts will hold you from tanking a blow harmless to you and doubts when faced with unknown power may lead to your doom.”
“That’ll take some time. Old instincts die hard.”
“Hm.” Cal spoke, “First law: Learning is easy.”
Sergeant tripped.
Orlsen gasped, then giggled. “I get it. Wait… No… What if I… yes! Wow it makes sense!”
Descent through the lightless corridors was marked by the sounds of discovery and flashes of psionic powers. The water dripping down the walls thickened into trickles. Footsteps crushed coral more often than concrete. Hive flora flourished here, engulfing them in an abyssal ecosystem. The cries of Hive creatures penetrated the walls, long deep undulations and indescribable shrieks. Stampedes of swarms in the surrounding sectors shook the ground.
The very air tasted of Europe’s sea.
Cal dismissed his first law, when he heard the churning rush of waterfalls ahead mixed with the chittering up ahead.
“Hundreds of them. Reverence, loyalty…” Orlsen’s whisper hitched under a breath. “Weariness, acceptance, pain… Are they human?”
“Wait here.”
Cal tore a cloak of hive foliage from the wall and draped himself in it on the way. The hallway terminated at a sudden drop. Below gaped a maw-like ravine of jagged cliffs lush with biomechanical life forms. Waterfalls rushed down in cascades twinkling with bioluminescence. Structural collapse had sealed the route forward and incidentally opened a shortcut straight to Rogue.
Mirror-gray silhouettes swarmed the surface of dark waters. Lights blinked beneath them, three to five floors deep. The green-teal light pattern of immersion pods moved. Smaller creatures gathered the pods towards a sprawling entity of tumorous metal growths. Reality wobbled in its presence, erupting with brief psionic manifestations near the assimilated pods.
Once more, Cal wondered if his lost kindred were worth the effort. Without regrets, she’d said, but how Cal was not yet certain if he was still capable of regret.
Cal returned to the soldiers shortly.
Orlsen and Sergeant had urgent questions
He drew a curving line on the wall and spoke to Irel, “Through here to here, bar all communication from the room before us at my sign. Europe should not learn of my survival before she fights Knight, or she may suspect trickery. Sergeant, help her endure it. Jaud, keep them alive.”
Sergeant repowered affirmative.
“Shit. Hivemind is that rough to block off?”
“No, but the psionic recoil of containing my power will be considerable.”
“Haha! Aight. Lez go. Hit me up with the fun stuff, Jaud. I know you’ve been holding back. Gimme.”
“Narcotics will not improve your performance.”
Cal agreed.
Irel pulled and lighted a cigarette. “Stingy ass infinite drug machine.”
“Cal, what can I do?” Orslen had a look of fierce determination.
“Nothing right now.”
He returned to the chasm drowning in glowing waterfalls. Cal discarded his cloak and gave Irel the sign.
A line was drawn in reality.
Hive stirred into agitated motion and noise. Cal stepped into the light. Starsteel glinted in his hand.
A canyon of glowing eyes locked onto him. They recognized him even without Europe whispering in their souls and knew him as the enemy. Limbs tensed. Air shimmered beneath psionic auras gathering power.
The first notch of his Crown cracked into existence with thunder as Cal spoke.
“First Law: Thinking is shared.”
Cacophony.
A stream of hundreds of thoughts drowned each and every mind present all at once.
The trapped souls of lost kindred, the Hive creatures, and the soldiers behind Cal lost their egos in a swamp of tangled minds. Too much and too fast to be ever comprehended. A deluge of cranial noise that elicited metal cries to match the mental scream. A scream that all within his presence joined.
All but one.
His calm timbre cut through it, as if the world itself bent all of existence to listen and heed.
“Second Law: Thoughtspeed is defined by willpower.”
Silence erupted.
Neither the soldiers, the forsaken, nor the fraction of a hivemind could hold a thought or utter one into words, for their wills were matched against a Fate.
Cal regarded the now recoiling creatures. They shirked from his blazing glare, eyeing his two notched crown with hesitation. His gaze fell to the pods.
“I am Allking.” His voice reverberated into thoughts and his thoughts into wordless understanding, when his mind held a mindscape that seared through and deep into all minds present.
In a white hall that refused to be defined by proportions or shapes, Allking sat on his throne woven from the abstract wrangle in which laws of reality are written. There, garbed in his trusty mantle of flowing metal and crowned by System, he beheld Earth floating in a place between the Cosmos and the Beyond. The planet flickered through the various transformative ends it had met in the hundreds of simulated resets, the good, the bad, and the catastrophic. The vista was among Cal’s most beautiful mindscapes, an appropriate final vision for any who might soon depart.
His lost kindred had calmed. Unhurried, he granted them all the time they needed, ignoring the System’s warnings of dropping hume levels.
Blue ripples encased the planet, radiating to encompass the universe itself. Then the world plunged into a dream. Then billions of stars shot out from its surface as ascended beings. Certain endings were less visual, barely observable from space, but Cal added his own flourish to those, re-imagining the final visions of his peers as planet spanning utopias and idyllic verdance or blazing hellscapes.
“This is the last one you would have to endure,” he told the lost kindred. “Unfortunately, the reset has progressed to a point where you cannot leave the battle of the Fountain.”
Hopelessness radiated from his lost kindred.
“I would still offer you a chance.”
A mix of emotions wafted through the mindscape. Anger. Weariness. Thousands of years of repressed resentments fossilized into undefinable emotions deeper than love and harder than hate.
He recognized some.
A woman. In the pre-Fate age, several hundred resets ago, she had been his companion. Together, they’d led an organization of some kind, though he could no longer remember what or why. He recalled only her love for teaching and the scent of an extinct African coffee that she resurrected in every reset.
Another one, a person who’d been a vital figure in the early resets, where the greatest struggle was escaping the controlled simulation and seizing the Fountain from Xcore. Dragon had destroyed their will.
He’d known most of them once, before the thousands of years spent as a Fate had estranged them.
Their answers whispered through the mindscape as emotions, words, and half-lucid hallucinations. They’d each begged Fates for oblivion’s sweet release in ages past. They’d ended their lives early to be spared the forever looping reset wars.
Lifetimes of madness and pain. Unfathomable despair. Inevitable sorrows and hopes so futile they would struggle to qualify as delusions. They knew the hells they’d have to wade through better than even the Fates who authored it.
Through that pain, a discord of voices.
Even if…
Maybe this time…
Might not fail…
Beg you…
Let me try.
Just once…
Yes.
Please.
One last.
Chance.
“Granted.”
The attention of Allking shifted from the endings of Earth to the souls beneath him. In reality, his crown stirred.
Sensing the shift in his psionic presence, the Hive launched at him, swimming, sprinting, crawling, up the walls rushed a layer of death bringing metal from the deepest pits of Europe’s Grave. Their forms shimmered with psionic powers and the world at the bottom of the ravine deepened beneath the weight of the cancerous entity’s swelling presence.
In the mindscape, where the ends converged into the current state of Earth, he spoke a word.
“Awaken.”
Power rippled.
Familiar eyes lit up. Ten. Thirty. A ninety and spare. These beings were neither Fates, nor quite mortals. They’d been ancient a hundred timelines ago, both feeble but deeper even than Europe’s dream.
Cal released his Laws.
Irel collapsed onto her knees, in the tunnel behind him, bleeding from every orifice.
Chitter and metallic death racing towards him presumed dominance over the ambiance of his mindscape. The fastest creature lunged with a saw-toothed tendril.
System reported changes in the Kingdom. Laws cap, three. Hume net, up by two. Sufficient. He had recovered enough to speak the first law.
The tendril split into ten. Barbed whips spread in a spiraling net around him. Cal kicked his slippers into its eyes, grabbed the tendrils into a bunch, yanked the creature into his dagger, and slung the corpse down.
“First Law: Gravity is forbidden.”
Sudden weightlessness struck reality.
The tide of bodies that’d rushed upwards stumbled a step. Waterfalls that’d rush to fill the warped ravine lost directions mid-fall. The abyss of water broke, spilling freely into air as droplets and puddles. Biomechanical algae, vines, and cables floated.
Creatures born of crushing abyss recovered in seconds. Those with limbs that could grab the ground propelled themselves, while others rode on them. Creatures hurled themselves, several leapers launched at Cal.
He’d recovered enough for a second law.
“Second Law: Newtonian inertia is forbidden.”
Water stopped.
The creatures stuttered to a halt.
For a breath, only Allking moved.
Graft reinforced toes gripped the jagged cliffs. Calm steps took him within range of suspended creatures. A slug-like tankform five times his size twisted its tentacular tail, slamming its armored beaks into him. Cal halted the strike with a lazily raised backhand. Gripping the twitching carapace for leverage, he autopsied the flailing creature mid-air to relieve it of its Empyrean fragment.
Crown. Initiate shard-burn protocol.
The fragment in his grip flared ablaze with psionic fire as Cal descended the cliff with leisurely steps and culled those on his path. These were not clean kills delivered in elegant cuts and stabs, for the physics behind them had been rendered impotent. Death had to be delivered by carving, with a starsteel chisel and liquid muscle hammer.
They fought back, lunging at the fragment in his grip to stop System from taking over it. Swirling appendages sought to latch onto Cal. Those who’d learned how to move again squirmed to block him. Those with psionics attempted to blink, phase, fly, or teleport through broken reality.
These were the first fumbling steps of fawns against a hunter in his favored forest.
Cal flowed past the flashing form of a deep scarab materializing above him, turned aside a psionically accelerated whip-claw, and struck down a wall-phaser attempting to warp the ground beneath him into entangling metal corals. A trail of bodies floated in his wake, writhing, bleeding, consumed from within by psionic pyres of their wounded fragments.
The malevolent tide of metal retreated, converging into a ravine-wide wall. Bodies entwined. More mass joined the wall. Tendrils, spines, and circular maws protruded as it began to envelop him in a cage.
[Synchronization complete.]
[Initiating shard-burn.]
Until the shard burnt out, he had enough for three laws.
Enough for basic law dancing.
Cal braced and permitted gravity to return, and gravity returned to reality with violence.
Water raced down in glitched showers and drunken waterfalls. The wall of Hive collapsed. They crashed into water, creating body-shaped cavities on the waveless surface. Hive struggled to reorient.
“First law: Falling is instant.”
Water exploded with waves. Rain thundered down in a punishment of blows and waterfalls bored through concrete. Creatures who’d hung on slammed into the jagged cliffs and the ground beneath water.
“Third law: Impact is forbidden.”
Cal leapt off the ledge and appeared several floors underwater atop a hive adapter struggling to regenerate its crushed head. He dismissed the third and second laws, executed ten creatures within an arm’s reach, and set his eyes on the cancerous mass.
It had seized the pods. Some power kept the awakened lost kindred from fighting back. Reality hummed, concentrating around several simulation pods infected by the pulsing mess of metallic bulbs and barbs. Glowing white-blue apparitions overlapped with it and the creature blurred into a superposition wherein it took every possible action and no action at all. Probability bending, manifestation, intangibility, and clairvoyance?
Swimming monsters spiraled at Cal from every angle. Veil-clad fish, tentacled crustaceans, and human-faced eel-things. Each carried patches of that glowing seafloor cancer. Each flickered in infinite possible positions.
Cal’s words bubbled out.
“First law: Swimming is forbidden.”
Four died before the crawlers reached him, but the dead ones had reacted before he spoke. Roughly four hundred ms before he spoke. Limited clairvoyance, but with very little vision to action latency. The cancer was surprisingly formidable.
They attempted to surround him, he forbade the act of restricting.
They’d predicted this and arranged a circle of bladed creatures to close upon him like a deep sea blender.
Cal baited them close before forbidding all perception.
Seconds later, he emerged drenched in Hive fluids, four steps closer to the center of the sprawling growth.
The Hive rushed him.
All died the instant his knife touched them. He’d switched laws while forbidding perception.
The superposition crustaceans and crawlers had near infinite chances to strangle him, but infinite tries were not enough to touch a Fate endowed with two grafts.
In their dying breaths, they threw their bodies at him, attempting to make Cal touch the glowing growths. None made it past the knife’s hilt.
Another law swap allowed breathing underwater, for his convenience.
The one after that turned all motion instant, rendering the world into a jagged slide-show of crashing waves, stilted aftermaths of stabs and motions, and a field of corpses that spread with every step he took towards the cancerous growth.
Cal switched laws to systematically crush the enemy into a corner until the last dying embers of the fragment in his grip.
Yet it did not run from him. That unusual persistence was what gave it away.
Almost two minutes had passed since he'd stepped to face the Hive.
Deep underwater, unbothered by neither the water nor its pressure, Cal loomed over the rapidly pulsing central nerve of the great Hive mass.
“Did you believe I would not see through your guise?” asked Cal, meeting the gaze of the mangled woman trapped in a simulation pod beneath the growths. “Hive has learned of System’s ability to override their control of fragments in this reset. They will not attempt it again.”
“Doesn’t matter. Got you to awaken them.”
Rogue’s voice was a raspy heave distorted by the overgrown isolation pod. Her physical form was that of a weak twenty year old woman of blonde hair and gaunt features at odds with the Fate that met his gaze. The cancerous growths pulsed and vibrated over her eviscerated neck, destroyed heart, cracked skull, and torn limbs. She’d been dead and half-way through warping into a Hive creature, before taking over the local hivemind.
Cal glanced at the hundred some lost kindred whose powers Rogue had access to. He fixed her with a judging glare. She knew this did not put her in a position of advantage.
“Ask away,” he said. “You went through much trouble to elevate your leverage.”
“A new body.”
“Granted.”
“Grafts of your design.”
“Granted.”
“Alliance.”
“No.”
“Ally–”
“I refuse.” His gaze grew cold with the memory of their last alliance. “Kindly.”
Her eyes hardened. “A day ago in real time, I was killed after stealing some of Empyrean’s memories.”
Cal’s stare was devoid of patience, but he allowed her to continue.
A bio-optic fiber slithered up from Rogue, offering itself to Cal.
“First law: Spying is Forbidden. Now speak.”
The cable slithered back. Rogue manifested several borrowed clairvoyant powers in a sequence, scanning their surroundings.
“I glimpsed her time before Earth. There was a person, I’m not certain if they were human, but they chased her here. And now they’re here, disguised as one of us. Count the names Ally. Count us.”
Dragon.
Dream.
Allking.
Magus.
Seductress.
Knight.
Merchant.
Reaper.
Priest.
Nobody.
Elder.
Bard.
Rogue.
Fake.
“Fourteen,” said Rogue. “There are thirteen Fates, but we remember fourteen names, because a being from outside our world has implanted themselves among us.”
