Chương 90: Book 8 - Chapter 86 - It must be her

For as long as I'd known Wrath, she was a vain, haughty, gullible little cinnamon roll who I'd had the best times of my life with. One of the single best engineers I knew without even trying, a font of every possible knowledge of the old age, and endlessly patient in answering every godsdamned question that came to mind. I could ask her to help calculate pie one moment, ask for her opinion with new occult blade shapes for serious wartime use, and if she'd still hire me as her underling if I were a worm.

She'd take all of those questions and answer each one with the same serious consideration no matter how ridiculous. The single most breathtaking woman I knew in my life, both inside and out. The lizard part of my brain simply assumed her having any feelings for me was just fantasy. Lunacy. I'm just a human, and one that's constantly pissed her off in countless creative ways. And somehow despite all that, she… The Retainers around me brought me back to the world and out of my head.

"Lord Emperor." The clan knight next to me spoke.

"The Icon needs to speak to you, of extreme urgency." I turned to him, still in a half-daze. The surface clan helmet stared back in my direction. As if the knight was trying to figure out what to say.

"She is shutting down systems and preparing to retreat. You must speak to her, now." I snapped out of my thoughts, focusing. My helmet was back on my head in moments, and the HUD lit back to life, connecting with the local airspeeder here, transmitting my message across the sea.

"What's going on?"

"Relinquished has found us." The Icon said.

"Conviction is demanding I cease command operations and retreat while he distracts Relinquished."

"What? Don't we have an estimated two or so hours last you checked?"

"Those were projected while she used more conventional methods of searching for us. She has begun to burn the ocean to the ground instead, destroying the physical hardware all across the world. Millions of square miles are being overloaded and shut down manually by her hand. She is desperate. Is your plan finalized or have you modified it?"

"I, uh, no. My plan's unchanged. Just, it's not Urs or Talen to draw her out. Just me."

"Understood Mr. Winterscar. Preparing the field now." There was a click, and then the audio cut. As if she had been ripped away. Despite that, a gold portal appeared before me. And what I saw on the other side told me that this was it. The last portal she could spawn. The final destination we had picked. Only a lot earlier than we planned for.

The fortress was still orbiting the world, and would need to both readjust the direction to fly to our location, and also slow down into geosynchronous orbit, both of which would take time. Which meant I had an hour or two at best to drag Relinquished up and kill her personally, before Wrath would need to break her own soul to do the same. The knight at my side bowed deeply, and the retainers behind him all knelt down in the snow. Waiting for me. This was where it ended, one way or another.

And I had nothing else to lose that mattered more. I took a breath, and stepped through the portal.

Fear. She felt its bite for the first time in centuries. For the first time since Talen. His inheritor had appeared after seven hundred years since his fall, and claimed what she had thought buried and forgotten. What should have remained shambling in the darkness forevermore. Now that fear remained deep inside her like a tumor slowly spreading outwards. She'd seen the enemy on the other end, the new emperor of humanity.

She could crush him like a grape if she could only get her hands around his neck to throttle the threat. Out in the digital sea, she could pull an entire planet's worth of power bent around her hands. This boy barely out of his twenties would be no match for her might. And yet fear was. Closing in like walls around her. She did not fear his power, she feared the clever plans they had all strung together. The story they were weaving under her sight. The schemers in the dark.

Once more as she searched, she dug out the recorded footage she'd copied long ago. A faint human girl lay ahead of the two white hands soaked in blood. They had all thought she wasn't paying attention. Fools, it was the only thing she had been paying attention to this entire time. Occult power flared through the chassis, as To'Wrathh gained the fractal to heal. And would then go on to heal her human pet. But Relinquished was uninterested in that. It was what happened in between the events that mattered.

As To'Wrathh drew on the mites, frantic, panicked, they answered back. And branded her with their own fractal.

"WHEN THY SOUL IS ABOUT TO BREAK REACH FOR THIS SEED AND LET MANKIND'S LAST CHAMPION TAKE HIS PATH." The passage repeated over and over in the recording. She'd studied this branded fractal, and found it would forcibly move a machine soul from one soul fractal to another. A similar variant to Unity, only specialized. And Relinquished knew the other fractal this upstart of a tool carried within her. The soul prison fractal.

All her subordinates believed she had been the one to discover and subsume it into her library. But her subjects would never know the truth: Thousands of years prior, she had bartered this from the mites. In an attempt to capture Tsuya. Back in the dark ages of mankind, the thousands of years that stretched between the end of the golden age and the start of the empire.

Tsuya had existed all through those thousands of years, and Relinquished had once believed it would be trivial to catch the rouge goddess and trap her as entertainment. She only needed a bird cage of suitable size. This was a fractal built to contain the soul of a goddess. Nothing as powerful as herself of course, but the very core of it was there all along, deep within the occult concepts. Dormant. Until this moment where Relinquished knew it would be used as another chain around her neck.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it. Had they known all along her own tool would be turned against her? That far into the future?

"THOU, WREATHED IN CHAINS UPON THY SOUL. HEED THIS MESSAGE. THOU MUST BE THE STRONGEST OF THE FOUR. UPON THY CHAINS, SHE MUST BE HELD IN PLACE, OR ALL WILL BE LOST. DO NOT FAIL AS THY PREDECESSOR. THERE WILL BE NO THIRD CHANCE." What was once a maze filled with doorways and paths to escape her nature was rapidly shrinking into a singular corridor on rails. She was being herded into an ending that would be her demise.

She could see the path, To'Wrathh would use the Mite's branded fractal to forcibly move her into the prison fractal. The strongest of the four. Relinquished could see the subtext there. There was no other strength on the earth that could match against her power, and the mites knew she would easily break free of the prison commanded by To'Wrathh. Which meant the strength implied here was one of resolve. The strength of self-sacrifice. The humans were going to force her daughter into a heroic sacrifice.

If Relinquished allowed this to follow through all steps, it would be the end. She could feel the chess pieces being moved around, as she danced from check to check, trying to avoid the checkmate. Relinquished couldn't allow To'Wrathh to position her into this narrative direction. She had to interrupt the sacrifice before it happened, or subvert it in a way that would allow her to use her power to break free once more.

There was a solution here, and she would find it before the pawn, queen and rook pieces all forced her king into an inescapable position. She poured through the memory further. Back to the first stanza. When thy soul is about to break, reach for this seed and let mankind's last champion take his path. Mankind's last champion. A male. But there was something there she couldn't recognize within. The emperor had already been named, why then a champion?

She had to study the wording with methodical detail, for the only way out of this was to subvert this prophecy at the core. She could not allow herself to be caught on the surface. She had to kill the upstart of an emperor before he could buy the time he needed to have her wayward daughter catch her. The narrative had to be interrupted in some manner. And it began with hunting down Tsuya's leftover pet and ripping him off the wheel. That, she feared not.

For she had realized power would not allow her to escape what was coming, which meant if she had to gnaw her own leg off like a fox to escape this bear trap, then she would do so. Her hands ripped apart thousands of miles with each strike. Millions of physical mite structures, long abandoned by their masters and taken over by herself in their absence, embedded within walls across all stratas, flickered and powered off as she slowly penned in the runners. The world itself trembled under her demands.

The digital sea shrunk, breaking apart from one another into isolated lakes and oceans. The connection she had used to grow herself as strong as the planet itself was being systematically destroyed. She was the end of all things. She was Death. She was humanity's Death. The digital sea slowly contracted inwards, as region after region went dark under her shadow. It didn't matter if that server fed into her power or not, it was clear the humans were sidestepping to a direction no amount of power would break them.

There would be no heroic sacrifice, for there will be no chance to do so in the first place. Humanity would perish. Her wayward daughter and accompanying human would live as exiles out in a world they failed, hiding from her sight. That would be their story. She would use them as the balancing point on the other end, so that there was always someone there to rage against, and allow her to eradicate the rest of humanity without pause. But first, she had to hunt down her wayward son.

Like chasing a small goldfish in a lake, she slowly narrowed down the locations he could flee, and methodically ripped and drained the lake away. Until only shallow tide pools were left, and soon not even that remained. Isolated into a corner, with only the mite seabed under left. Relinquished swept through the entire sector until she felt the small caught fish in her hand and slammed it into the seafloor, trapped. It was done.

She appeared a moment later, towering above the small bubble of vanishing perspectives, the chaos that was hiding her misbehaving child. It was well built, like a blind spot in her vision. She knew it was there and yet it slipped over her mind like a trick. But she held him trapped none-the-less. And he knew it well himself. She gave him only a few seconds to walk out of his own volition before she crushed his bubble of chaos and squeeze him out herself. At the very least, her first born was no coward.

Stepping calmly out into the seafloor, he materialized from the chaos he hid within. The temple Tsuya once ruled from powered down behind him, the gears and ever changing dimensions slowing down until they remained frozen and lifeless. The last bastion of humanity, dead at last.

"A01." She grinned deeply.

"I find great relish in informing you, abomination, that I am not him." Relinquished paused, uncertain if this was a trap or a joke. The truth as she discovered a moment later was far more benign.

".... A shard? Truely? A shadow of the original, with barely any of his power and only his sword handed down. How… droll. I suppose that is fitting that his time runs out in the moment the world needs him most."

"My progenitor will return to fight you to his last breath. Of that, I am certain."

"Your progenitor is dead." What other reason would Tsuya's temple be commanded by a mere shard instead of the original himself? They had run out of options.

"He failed to assassinate me at my weakest and the cost of his attempt was paid in full at a dear price. His body now floats above the world in a sinking coffin that will soon be brought low. What hope do you have, little shard?"

"None." And yet he drew his blade out, the last remnants of a defective product.

"Hope is not the reason I stand here. Honor is. I have lived without it. But this moment, I will die with it." She recognized a doomed final speech when she heard it and felt deep inside the pull to monologue back. But this one was too far removed from the narrative to have the gravity needed for it. With a hiss of effort, she broke free, and snapped out to destroy this shard before he could do something else.

Best to eliminate him, and then put her attention to ripping apart the rest of the paralyzed humanity above. Her hand extended at the shard and power flooded through, smiting the doomed program once and for all. When she was done, she observed her handiwork and found it interrupted. The drifting remains of a broken glimmer of power floated down, having drawn all of the danger to itself and snapped into pieces like a lightning rod.

And under that was the shard, holding his blade to repel her attack, occult dome prepared against the onslaught that had never come. He blinked, surprised. Beams of power flashed through, peppering her hands, ripping upward from the mite firewall itself, stinging like wasps at her fingers. She hissed, bringing her hand away. Watching the ground under the shard, from which the beams had been fired. The shard remained, weapon ready. And Relinquished saw there was true surprise at the backup.

The attack hadn't been expected then. Relinquished looked down to the sediment below.

"Dragging the Mites into this was a poor choice. Now I can make demands in exchange." She did so, reaching to the blasted power sulking under her feet, demanding her machine network to be restored if they were to play favorites and personally protect this lowly shard. The answer returned negative. All was in balance. They had made no deals with humanity for this, and no deals with the shard standing here either. She was paying the price for what she had demanded.

A stab of pain rocked into her head, and she realized the shard had begun fighting her. Fighting her. As if this shadow of a shadow even had a chance. Fury took her soul in that moment and she swatted the shard midair with a backhanded swing. What should have killed him failed to. There was once again a crack of breaking power, as if her attack had been redirected somewhere else. Pattern recognition software found a lock to what had just happened. She'd seen this technique done once.

When she had held a misbehaving Feather in her grip and tightened. Relinquished stared down at the seabed and narrowed her eyes.

"It seems you have a guardian angel on your side, shard. How convenient for you. I could have offered you a quick and painless death, and now it seems your end will be one of suffering. Fitting, I failed to kill your progenitor myself, letting him run off to die bleeding like a dog. You will have to do as his replacement." Relinquished grasped forward all at once. Once more beams of power sliced upward through the seabed, and cut away at her hands. Nothing that couldn't be healed, a sting of a gnat at most.

She could feel the presence still alive, out of her reach. Cowering among the mites from her grasp. The shard readjusted his weapon, preparing alternate combat routines, now adapting for a hidden guardian. No longer planning on defending his life but instead trying to defeat her with a thousand cuts. As if the fool actually had a chance. The beams once more shot through the seabed, but Relinquished waved them away. Once a gnat, always a gnat.

She would crush the shard, and then yank this misbehaving child of hers like a weed from the ground. Hilarious really. A twist of fate. She had loosed that Feather's restrictions just enough to threaten rebellion, in order to bait the human into her domain. And now she was here again, a product of her own mistakes. One she would rectify. To'Sefit had survived death once. She would not do so a second time.