Chương 53: Bellyside

If not for her wings, Nyx would be flailing around uncontrollably as she tumbled towards the black hole. They snapped wide, keeping her steady, but they couldn't stop her descent. Nyx had tried to beat her wings. She'd attempted to pull herself out of this fall that would leave her prey to the Eidolon gods once again, but the moment her feathery limbs swept backwards, she felt herself accelerate faster.

Slamming her wings forwards felt like fighting a mountain, and yet the effect wasn't enough to even slow her down. Her time was running out. If she didn't figure something out, she would return to the clutches of the Darkness. And something told her there would be no third chance. What could help her? If her wings couldn't oppose the strength of gravity, then it was unlikely any of her other mutations could… but she didn't throw away the idea immediately. Nyx knew her wings weren't complete.

If she threw away any hesitance and tore open her curse, then they might eventually become whole and allow her to fly out the black hole's pull. Time was of the essence, so she should act immediately. Yet… she couldn't do it. Nyx was terrified of sacrificing her future, even in such a dire situation. But was there any other options?

"Hold tight." Little God's radio static voice rang in her ear despite the speed she fell.

"What?" she exclaimed and spun her head back to the eyeball only for her chest to slam into something. Nyx groaned, and she was lucky her arms snapped around the object before she could rebound completely. Her chitinous hands gripped tight. Her hands immediately felt like they were on fire as she slid down some thick metal pole. It took her only a moment to realise what she'd grabbed — some long antenna, detector, or other such old tech — and she knew it was her only lifeline.

Yet the tendril of gravity continued to yank her down. Her hands, despite the smoke that trailed from the intense friction, were barely slowing her down. She looked down. The antenna wouldn't last forever. Taking a risk, she shifted her hands. The large claws clamped around thick pole, and she had to hope that the metal wasn't weak enough that her claws would tear it apart on the way down. Slowly, with what felt like the weight of a building bearing down on her wings and arms, she came to a stop.

She even had a good dozen metres before the pole ended. At least, before she accidentally cleaved through the thinner antenna tip when she'd jerked to a stop. Thankfully, only her lower pincers cut through the metal, so she didn't continue to tumble down into the depths. But it still left her hanging precariously on the end of a kilometres-long probe. For a moment, she just hung there.

A single pincer clung to the tip of the pole while the severed length stretched endlessly into the Darkness before disappearing entirely. It took her a few more moments to truly comprehend what just happened and hurriedly scamper up the antenna until she could hug it tight with her entire body.

"What the fuck, Eyeball?" She shouted, unable to snap her eyes from what lay below. She could feel their eyes. Monsters and gods were beginning to take notice, just as they had years in the future.

"This is not what I call safe!"

"But you are alive, are you not?" He floated there, completely unaffected by the tendrils of the black hole that still grasped at Nyx's body. Nyx laughed.

"Alive? You do realise how close I was to death? What if I'd missed the pole? What if I'd cleaved through it earlier and fallen into the black hole?" Little God twisted its eye between Nyx and the Darkness below in confusion.

"I do not understand. You were never close to death. Should you fall, we would only return home." She had to do her best not to scream at the little bugger. Right now, it was far more important to focus on getting out of this precarious position instead of worrying about the idiocy of a god. Even if it just revealed itself to be from the Darkness. Sliding her claws up the antenna one at a time, her efforts to climb were slow and exhausting. It felt like her body weighed ten times normal. Her arms ached.

After climbing only a few metres, she discovered having her wings stretched wide helped somewhat, but it wasn't nearly enough considering the journey she had ahead of her. The pole was long. Long enough that she could even see the smaller platforms that extended beyond Coral's main body. It had taken effort to climb only a few metres, how difficult would it be to climb the kilometres she had to reach the lower surface again? But Nyx had no choice. Either she climbed, or fell and died.

Instead of focusing on the burn in her arms, she turned her attention to Coral itself. It wasn't her first time seeing it from such an angle, but at least now she had more than a few moments to take it all in before she was swallowed by the Eidolon gods. She'd noticed this when she'd been sacrificed, but Coral appeared nothing like what she'd been shown. It wasn't a circular platform of shiny metal with a glass dome on top and an inverted mountain of metal probes below. Coral wasn't even symmetrical.

Though, there were enough similarities that it wasn't hard to imagine that what Nyx had been shown might have been what the orbital platform might have looked like many years ago. They only knew Coral's outer appearance from ancient pamphlets, wall-mounted maps found in the old railways used before the Machine God Worshippers' Trolley network was put in place, and the rare digital storage drive decoded without the data coming alive and affecting the decoder's mind. Enjoying this book?

Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. Essentially, they knew their ancestors had created Coral and positioned the orbital station right above the black hole, and nothing more. At least, nothing more that wasn't kept hidden by the cults. Compared to those images, what stood above Nyx was worlds apart. First and most obvious was the fact that flesh seemed as incorporated into Coral's structure as metal, despite there only having been metal in the original map.

In fact, the section directly above Nyx throbbed in a constant rhythm. No doubt related to its proximity to Coral's actual heart. Then there were the eight platforms that extended from the sides of the main orbital. Each were connected to Coral by bridges. And each bridge was built differently; some with flesh and blood, others with metal and machine. All reflecting the form of each external platform that mimicked the shape of Coral. Wait … eight? Nyx paused her climb to stare. There was only six when I died.

The external platforms weren't small by any means — each maybe a sixth of Coral's impressive size — so they couldn't just disappear. Something happened to them; Nyx just didn't know what. Where they destroyed? Or did the black hole's tendrils tear them free? Nyx doubted the cults were in the dark about their existence. More than likely, they were the creators.

While the fleshy growths and inverted metallic pillars appeared random, and most likely formed by some mechanism of corruption, the external platforms were orderly. They stretched outward from Coral for a reason. A reason Nyx could only guess.

"Fuck, Eyeball," Nyx groaned as the ache of her arms grew worse. Even at the limits of her body, this was too much for her.

"Next time you choose a 'safe' path, make sure it's safe for the average first evolution harbinger. Not whatever exaggerated opinion you have of me."

"…then I change our current path?" He was planning to put her through more than this? She wanted to strangle him. Yet, she had to hold herself back; her hands would unfortunately pass through Little God's body as ineffectively as every other time she'd tried to strike him before she knew what he really was.

"Yes!" Nyx barely got the word out before movement above attracted her attention. At first, she thought they were bugs. A swarm of locusts. But as her third eye focused — crossing immense distance without any loss of clarity — she observed and consumed constructions of steel. They were bots. Machines that thrust through space leaving plume trails in their wake from their manoeuvring thrusters. There were hundreds of them, and they came in sizes varying between a rat and larger than herself.

Though the majority were about as large as a dog. The bots design was purely utilitarian. They held folded robotic arms at the front, and its overall shape was triangular. Narrow near the operational end, likely to allow easier access to smaller spaces while keeping a rather large space for its mechanisms and storage. Considering they were automated machines, Nyx's first thought was that they were automatons of the Machine God Worshipper. But they were too beaten up to be.

The Worshippers treated their automatons like the Machine God itself. A scratch on their devotion's surface was considered a blasphemy worth punishment. They would rather cripple themselves. While damage was often unavoidable in battle against spawn and other creatures of the Darkness, the most devoted would inflict the same damage their automatons experience on their own body as penance.

So to see hundreds of bots with deep scratches and a thin covering of dust, it was impossible to believe these were from that cult. No, most likely they were unrelated to any cult. A fact she found immediately relieving due to her hatred of the cults, but really shouldn't have been. They swarmed the base of of the antenna far overhead. A jolt rippled through the pole. Nyx hugged her lifeline as tight as she could, lest she be thrown off as the thrumming vibrations inflicted by the machines continued.

The flying bots didn't descend for her. Instead they seemed content on destroying the point where the antenna connected to Coral. They could manoeuvre through space easily with their thrusters, yet they never veered more than a few metres from the undersurface. Why were they after her? What reason could these machines have to end her existence? Even if they were twisted by corruption, would it not make more sense for them to come after her directly?

Though, expecting logic from anything corrupted was folly in itself. Another jolt shook the pole. If not for her pincers, she would have been knocked free. Quickly, Nyx curled her legs and wings around the antenna, holding as tightly as she could against the immense pull of the black hole and the sudden sideways shift. The inverted pillar was kilometres long. So when it began to fold in to the side at only a few degrees a second, Nyx found herself accelerating at a pace she nearly couldn't handle.

The swarm of bots had done something to the base of the antenna, and now it was tilting up. Like an inverted tower falling on its side, Nyx could do nothing but watch as she shot towards Coral again. At least the pole hadn't been severed. Nyx prepared herself for the impact. She readied herself to hold on tight, or catch herself should she be thrown off or the antenna broke on contact. After everything that led to this point, she didn't believe it could be anything but a hard landing. Only… she barely felt it.

The massive antenna touched Coral and stopped. Nyx went from hundreds of metres per second to a dead stop, and didn't even feel the jerk of rapid acceleration. No strain passed through her body, yet she'd been so tensed for impact that she nearly sheared through the pole again with her pincers. Tendrils of the black hole still hooked around her, but this high up, they no longer made her feel so many times heavier. She snapped her wings wide, and actually felt like she might be able to hold her weight here. Almost.

She looked up only to find the bots flying towards her. This was no time to worry about whether she could fly or not; she needed to be ready for a fight. So, holding one claw to the once again stationary pole — now horizontal — she held the other out at the ready. Nyx's third eye already burned through the metal of the drones long before they reached her, yet she found it difficult. They were made of quality alloy. It would take her more than a few seconds to disable even the smallest of them.

Nyx held her arm back, ready to slash at the first bot to come for her. When it came, she struck. Her claws dug into the metal, but it wasn't clean. The bot spiralled down below, its thrusters working overtime to reorient itself and pull it out of a deathly fall into the Darkness. Satisfied with at least a semi-effective hit, she turned her attention back to the swarm… and found them avoiding her. In seconds, every bot flowed around her. They missed her completely.

Or, more accurately, they were never aiming for her in the first place. She glanced behind her, and found the machines were already getting to work welding sections of metal onto the tip of the antenna. Protrusions that sparked with heat pressed into parts of the pole she'd passed only minutes ago. They weren't trying to attack her. They were only repairing the damage she'd caused. Nyx glanced down again, only to find the bot she'd struck hovering a dozen metres out of range.

Its side sparked, obviously from the damage she'd inflicted, yet it only hovered there, waiting for something from her.

"This way." And Little God continued to guide her. As if nothing had happened. As if this was all expected. She couldn't manage a response, so she followed without a word. As soon as she was gone, the bot dove in to fix the divots she'd carved into the metal. Not only was the drone's side sparking, but there was some sort of liquid spilling out. Nyx felt a little guilty.