Chương 116: 115: Stuck

Butter, Korhess and the Commander remained within the chamber as the walls slowly repaired themselves around them. Introductions had ended. Silence settled in their place. Zeinai turned. His blue eye found Korhess's face. His white eye settled upon the spear resting in her hands. When he spoke, his voice was quiet, thoughtful, like a man finally asking a question that had waited years to be spoken.

"The Nonagon," he said.

"Perhaps that is what will cause it." He looked back at Butter. His expression remained calm, his hands steady. He stood in the centre of a room that had been a battlefield, still was a battlefield, and perhaps always would be, yet his attention rested entirely on the girl he had hunted for the past decade.

"Why did you only free Katherine?" he asked.

"Why not the others? The pods were full. Hundreds of dreamers. Thousands. You had the power. You had the time." His head tilted slightly.

"Why did you leave them?" Butter stumbled backwards. The photograph trembled between her fingers.

"I..." Her voice caught.

"Her hair, I guess. I don't... I don't know." Korhess stepped beside her, resting a reassuring hand upon Butter's shoulder.

"Peace, little sapling," she murmured, her voice carrying the hush of old forests after rain.

"The youngest branch needeth not account for every wind that bendeth it. Thou art not bound to harvest understanding before thy heart hath drawn its next breath." Her thumb brushed Butter's shoulder with quiet tenderness.

"Breathe. The grove rebuketh not the leaf for trembling beneath the storm." Butter stared blankly at the photograph. The pods. Her stomach dropped. She had forgotten them. She had crossed the facility, fought the Steppers, died, returned, died again, and somewhere along the way she had forgotten why she came. The dreamers. The harvest. Thousands of stolen minds trapped inside those pods, refined into fuel for a machine that was somehow still waking beneath the facility.

She had planned to shut the system down from the command centre. That plan had simply slipped away. Why? A chill settled deep inside her chest. The Nonagon. It had been with her ever since Katherine died, whispering possibilities, feeding her power, filling her thoughts with futures that had never happened. She had been so consumed by the Commander, by the thing awakening beneath the facility, by surviving one impossible battle after another, that she had never questioned why the Nonagon wanted Katherine so badly.

Why her? The facility shuddered. The roar came again. Closer. The galaxy-thing was climbing. It tore through floor after floor with the relentless hunger of something imprisoned for far too long. Yet beneath that overwhelming presence...... Butter felt another. Katherine. She was coming too. Butter didn't know whether she was coming to save them...... or to finish what the Nonagon had begun. Her breathing became uneven. The photograph crumpled beneath trembling fingers as panic tightened around her chest.

"Thy heart runneth ahead of thee," Korhess said softly.

"Call it home, dear child. Even the swiftest stream returneth at last unto the sea." Butter scarcely heard her. Where was Clock? The thought surfaced instinctively. He was the only person who could calm her when everything became too loud. The only one who could untangle the storm in her head before it consumed her. Ever since they were children, ever since the training yard, ever since the first time she had fallen and he had reached out to catch her... He had always been there. And right now......

she needed him more than ever. Zeinai clicked his gauntlet. The sound was soft, final, the sound of a man who had been waiting a very long time to close a door that had remained open for far too long.

"Release Thornburgh's family," he said quietly.

"Get them on a plane. Get them off this continent. Now." He looked at Butter. His face remained calm. His eyes were bright.

"I'm staying." His gaze drifted toward the trembling walls as another distant roar echoed through the facility.

"I need to see what Paris was so concerned about. I need to understand what required his daughter to be murdered." Korhess studied Butter for a long moment before speaking.

"Little saela... whilst thy slumbering song possessed thee, thou wert no longer bound unto the paths thou hast long trodden." Her ancient eyes narrowed thoughtfully.

"The branches beneath thy feet bent in patterns unknown unto me. Thou didst race upon thy hands and feet as though thou wert some woodland beast, and thy steps sang verses no tutor hath ever placed within thy keeping." Butter blinked.

"I... what?"

"Those arts were not thine," Korhess continued.

"Yet they bloomed from thee all the same. Strange fruit upon a familiar tree." Butter looked down at her prosthetic leg. It had reattached itself minutes ago. She flexed it experimentally. The memory surfaced. Splitting the moon. At the time it had felt distant, dreamlike, as though she had been watching somebody else inhabit her body. Now...... she understood.

"My unconscious state..." she whispered. Solfège. When it activated, her body still obeyed her brain. It simply did so without conscious thought. Autopilot. She frowned. The techniques... Winter's style. The footwork from old martial arts films. The forms she had watched online. The countless little movements she had absent-mindedly admired throughout her life. She had never mastered them. She had merely seen them.

Solfège had reached into those memories and woven fragments together, borrowing glimpses of techniques she had witnessed before and executing them without hesitation or doubt. It wasn't creating new skills. It was assembling forgotten ones. Butter's eyes widened.

"Oh my." Nightlight. She closed her eyes for a heartbeat and checked her reserves. 27. 1%. Enough. Nightlight wasn't merely a swarm of glowing fireflies. Each tiny light was a memory. Together they formed perfect recall. Nothing they witnessed was ever forgotten. She had always used them to relive happy moments, revisit conversations, preserve little pieces of her life. The possibility had never occurred to her.

"They remember everything..." she murmured. Her breathing slowed.

"I could replay every technique they've ever seen." Korhess smiled faintly.

"The oldest tree keepeth every season within its rings, though few remember to count them." Butter stared at her prosthetic, excitement beginning to replace the fear in her chest.

"I don't need to learn everything anymore..." She looked up.

"I just need to remember it."... A zip. The sound was small, sharp, the sound of something moving faster than the eye could follow. Butter's hand was already rising when— Kiri landed in the centre of the room. She was tiny. Far smaller than Butter had expected. Her suit shimmered as it shifted between colours, sleek and impossibly fitted, the sort of equipment built for speed, misdirection and the thousand impossible escapes that had kept her alive for seven years. Butter immediately pointed at her.

"She's the one who attacked me before." Kiri gave a single nod.

"Affirmative." The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings. Her helmet folded away in overlapping segments, revealing a small face framed by a wavy bob with soft bangs. Her eyes were ancient, onyx black with iridescent flecks scattered through them like stars trapped beneath glass. It was the face of a child who had witnessed things that belonged only in nightmares. She crossed the room without hesitation. Her arms wrapped around Zeinai's waist, or as high as her small frame could reach.

Butter blinked. She had never seen a Magpie that small. Actually... She tilted her head. Not a magpie. A hummingbird. Zeinai's hand rose to Kiri's head, his fingers disappearing into her hair. His deep voice softened, becoming the voice of a weary man who had carried the same secret for so long he had forgotten what it felt like to set it down.

"You are not supposed to be out in the open," he said.

"You know the protocols." His thumb brushed gently across her hair.

"You should... go see your father." Kiri's reply came muffled against his chest.

"I couldn't leave. I haven't seen him yet. I haven't..." Her voice broke.

"He doesn't know I'm alive. He thinks I'm... he thinks I..."

"I know." His answer was almost a whisper.

"But this place is falling apart. The beast is waking. The girl carrying the Nonagon is—""I want to stay." Kiri stepped back. Her bright eyes burned with determination.

"I want to fight."

"No." The word carried neither anger nor cruelty. Only certainty.

"I will not let you die again," Zeinai said.

"You have already paid that price once. You leave. Now."

"I'm strong." She frowned stubbornly.

"I can heal, remember? Thrice. I can still do it three times. My gadgets are online, and Coconut's bringing my other gear." Korhess's voice barely rose above a whisper.

"Is that... the child?" Her golden eyes widened.

"The one Thornburgh believed had perished?" Zeinai never looked away from Kiri.

"Yes," he answered quietly.

"That is her." Korhess pressed both hands against her temples. Light caught along the polished curves of her antlers while her hooves scraped softly against the fractured stone.

"This faction..." she breathed.

"These halls... the roots beneath them run deeper than any woodland I have wandered. What hidden groves have ye cultivated beneath the world's own feet?" Her gaze settled upon Kiri.

"How didst thou shelter so small a blossom from so many winters?" Another blast came. The beam tore through the floor. Through the walls. Through the space where Kiri had been standing a heartbeat earlier. It moved differently now. Faster. More deliberate. The scream of something that had begun to learn. Something that was waking. Butter was already moving.

"Sforzando." The shield unfolded. The false dimension blossomed open. The beam, star-hot, planet-breaking, light-devouring, poured into a space that did not exist. The walls convulsed. The floor fractured beneath her boots. Ozone flooded the air, mixed with smoke, fear and the bitter scent of stone burning into glass. Butter bared her teeth. Both hands remained raised. Every muscle in her arms trembled beneath the strain. It held. The beam ceased. Far below them, the galaxy-thing roared.

The facility answered with another shudder. Dust rained from the ceiling. Butter remained standing. She was still holding. Kiri stood behind her now. Her eyes were wide. Her hands had curled into tight fists. Her breathing came in quick, uneven bursts as she stared at the smoking hole in the floor, at the molten edges still glowing white, at the thing climbing relentlessly toward them with a hunger that refused every denial. Butter never looked at her. Her eyes rested on Zeinai instead.

She no longer knew what to call him. Enemy. Ally. Neither word fit anymore. The neat little categories she had relied upon her entire life, the ones that decided who deserved saving, who deserved fighting and who deserved leaving behind, were collapsing around her just as surely as the facility itself. The galaxy-thing kept climbing. Katherine kept changing. Butter had no time left to invent new answers. Through the new hole in the floor, they could see it. Two levels below.

The yellow-and-white beast moved in blurs as every Magpie waiting in the lower levels struck from every direction. A Talon emerged from the shadows. His fist glowed. BOOOOOOOOM! The Shroud Punch caught the beast square across the jaw. Its head snapped sideways as plasma erupted from the impact. Before the creature could retaliate, the Talon dissolved back into the shadows. His forearm disappeared a heartbeat later, erased as the price of delivering an impossible strike. The monster whimpered.

Its eyes darted wildly through the darkness, searching for the attacker. Part of its very essence had been destroyed. Another opening appeared. The Talon emerged again. BOOOOOOOOM! A second Shroud Punch crashed into the back of the beast's skull. It screamed. The sound shook the entire facility. Its body convulsed violently as it lashed out in every direction, trying to catch an enemy who refused to remain in one place.

More of its substance fractured apart, yellow-white flesh splitting open while rivers of incandescent plasma spilled across the ruined floor. Gravity bombs followed. Black spheres no larger than fists slammed into its flank before collapsing inward. Space folded. Entire sections of the creature compressed toward impossible points, flesh caving beneath crushing gravity while the surrounding corridors buckled and twisted. The beast wailed. It thrashed so violently that it tore chunks from its own body.

Disruptors clamped onto its limbs. Their engines screamed. Reality itself seemed to vibrate as they flooded the creature with frequencies designed to disrupt its control over its impossible biology. Heat answered them. The monster simply burned through the machines. Metal melted. Electronics burst apart. The disruptors fell away as glowing slag. It fought through everything. Without warning...... it skipped. The creature lurched forward through space like frames cut from a film reel.

Reality continued moving normally around it while the beast simply... arrived somewhere else. Every Magpie froze. Nobody had expected that. That ability had never been engineered into it. It was terrifying for one simple reason. The creature was already moving at and beyond lightspeed. It had been born from compressed starlight. Motion came as naturally to it as breathing did to everyone else. The Steppers had never relied on matching that speed. They relied on prediction.

Their minds constantly calculated countless futures, allowing them to begin moving before an attack was launched. Their bodies blurred from one safe position to another while the beast crossed distances far too quickly for ordinary perception. The lurch shattered that advantage. A Stepper predicted the strike one second ahead. The beast skipped. The attack happened now instead. That single missing heartbeat was the difference between survival and extinction. Operatives fared only slightly better.

Their enhanced senses could actually perceive flashes of its movement where ordinary eyes saw nothing, allowing them to dodge through reflex and experience alone. Getting hit remained impossible to survive. One direct strike was the equivalent of allowing an entire star system to collide with you at point-blank range. Even their dispersal suits admitted defeat. Apis flooded through the armour in desperate waves, bleeding away impossible heat before flesh beneath could ignite.

Warning glyphs blazed crimson across helmets as reactors screamed under the strain. One clean hit would overwhelm every dispersal system they possessed. The battlefield erupted with illusions. Hundreds of holographic Magpies flooded the corridors, each moving independently, each attacking from impossible angles. The beast tore through them. Claws passed through empty light. Tails crushed phantoms. Every false target bought another fraction of a second for the real soldiers hidden among them.

Real blades slipped through those openings. Spears stabbed from blind spots. Gravity charges detonated beneath its feet. Shroud Punches emerged from shadows before disappearing again. The creature answered with growing fury. Its milky scent thickened. Warmer. Sweeter. Heavier. Someone finally shouted over the chaos.

"... Does anybody else smell milk?" A moment later another voice answered.

"It's getting stronger!" The smell rolled through the entire level, rich, hot and strangely comforting despite the horror surrounding it, like fresh milk left too long beside the heart of a star. Every passing second intensified it as the beast's core burned hotter and hotter beneath the relentless assault. Its claws found a Stepper. The Stepper simply ceased to exist. Its tail swept through a squad of Operatives. The wall behind them collapsed into rubble. The Operatives never reached the ground.

Its roar wasn't sound. It was pressure. The pressure of a star compressed for so long it had forgotten expansion was possible. The shockwave tore through floors, walls and support columns alike, reducing carefully engineered containment systems to collapsing debris. Only the Nest endured. Apis pulsed through every wall, every beam and every support column, absorbing heat that should have liquefied continents.

The living structure groaned beneath the strain, veins of amber light racing through the architecture as it struggled to contain something that should already have reduced the entire facility to molten slag.... Steppers answered with overwhelming violence. WHUMP! A planet-breaking projectile struck the creature's ribs. WHUMP! Another detonated against its shoulder. WHUMP! WHUMP! WHUMP! Heavy anti-fortress rifles thundered without pause, each round carrying enough force to flatten cities.

Space itself warped around the impacts as invisible shockwaves folded the air inward. Others preferred simpler methods. A Stepper carrying a colossal sledgehammer blinked into existence above the beast. KRRRRAAAANG! The hammer descended. Space fractured beneath the blow as though reality had been struck instead of flesh. The creature staggered. Another Stepper appeared beside him. BOOOOOM! A second hammer crashed into its spine. Spears of condensed gravity. Plasma lances. Molecular drills. Shredders.

Resonance cannons. Weapons pounded into the beast from every conceivable angle. FWOOOM! KRAAAANG! THOOOOM! SKREEEEE! Every strike carved another wound. Every wound immediately reminded them how enormous the task remained. They were carving into a mountain with knives. Nobody stopped.

"LEFT FLANK!"

"TELEPORT!"

"DISRUPTOR THREE, NOW!"

"CORE EXPOSURE!"

"HAMMER TEAM GO!"

"CLEAR!" The battlefield became a choir of shouted orders. Steppers blinked in and out of existence between commands, their predictions weaving together into a living network. Several younger Magpies laughed as they fought. One launched himself toward the beast with a prototype gauntlet humming dangerously.

"Testing Version Nine!" KABOOOOOM! The gauntlet exploded.

"So... Version Eight was better!" His teammates dragged him away while another Stepper took his place. Elsewhere, a woman gleefully fired a weapon that unfolded into six barrels halfway through the shot. FWIP-FWIP-FWIP-FWIP-FWIP-FWIP!

"IT WORKS!"

"It's on backwards!"

"Oh." The weapon detonated behind her instead. KRABOOOM! She emerged from the smoke coughing.

"Needs calibration!" Nobody laughed for long. Every second demanded another attack. Another distraction. Another impossible gamble. The beast kept climbing anyway. Butter stared. She could feel it now. Its weight. Hundreds of billions of stars. Compressed into a body scarcely larger than an elephant. Enough mass to destroy an entire solar system. Enough energy to scatter a galaxy like dust shaken from a rug. Enough to make the universe itself pause and wonder what had just happened.

The Shroud Punches had torn away enormous portions of it. They had not been enough. Henry's strike had been different. His suit had steeped inside the Hexagon's energy for hours before impact, saturating every attack until it carried overwhelming conceptual weight. These ordinary Shroud Punches still devastated the creature, yet they couldn't finish the job. Two consecutive blows had left fractures spreading through its centre, but the heart of the beast still endured. Far too much of it remained.

And they were fighting it...... with punches. The Talon was nowhere to be seen. He would be armless now. Talons could regenerate their bodies through Apis because they were already dead, but the Prism core couldn't survive three Shroud Punches in rapid succession. Two had already pushed it to its limits. — Butter slowly turned toward Zeinai. The question filled her eyes. Filled the tension in her jaw. Filled the trembling hands hanging at her sides. How did you build this?

Even restrained by a dozen disruptors, every violent movement threatened to nudge the planet itself from its orbit. It was that strong. That impossible. That wrong. Zeinai smiled. Kindness had no place in it. It was the expression of a man watching something he had created tear apart the very house built to contain it, only to discover an unexpected satisfaction somewhere within the destruction.

"It was never built to fight you," he said quietly. His eyes remained fixed upon the battlefield below.

"It was built to survive you." Butter frowned.

"In the event of your death," Zeinai continued, "we assumed your allies would come." His gaze followed another Magpie diving toward the beast.

"We also assumed they would bring something beyond our ability to stop." Another gravity bomb detonated. The floor buckled. The beast barely slowed.

"So we built something capable of meeting that possibility." His smile deepened almost imperceptibly.

"I simply never imagined it would be turned against us." Another Stepper disappeared beneath the creature's claws.

"The future arrives exactly as it chooses." He folded his hands behind his back.

"Plans merely provide it with suggestions." Butter looked back down at the beast. It kept climbing. It could be defeated. Yes. It could be killed. Everything could be killed eventually, if you hit it enough times. The amount of damage required, though...... the insane, impossible, utterly ludicrous amount of damage...... was a number Butter didn't have a name for. It reminded her of the video games Prism used to play. The ones where the final boss had health bars stretching across the entire screen.

This creature didn't have one health bar. It had millions. Each one stretched longer than an ocean. Each one concealed another ocean beneath it. An emerald-and-brown crescent-shaped prototype rolled beneath the beast. It locked into place. VRRRRRMMMM. A Cosmic Drain. The device drank heat the way a sink swallowed water. The glow racing across the creature's hide dimmed ever so slightly.

"It works!"

"It actually works!" Engineers shouted over the battlefield as more prototypes bounced across the ruined floor. Dozens. Hundreds. VRRRRMMMM. VRRRRMMMM. VRRRRMMMM. The entire ground began vibrating as every Cosmic Drain activated, greedily pulling away the impossible thermal energy pouring from the beast. Their emerald casings brightened while internal chambers compressed the harvested heat into ever-denser cores. The monster's temperature dropped. Barely. Butter watched the readings crawl downward. It was working.

Technically. Reality, however, cared very little for technicalities. The drains looked like a swarm of mosquitoes trying to empty an ocean. Or perhaps a swarm trying to drink a human dry. Possible. Eventually. If nothing interrupted them. If the creature remained perfectly still. If it didn't kill everyone first. The time required...... was measured in absurdities. Butter wondered if she should help. Only hours ago, she had wanted to release the beast. Now...... that decision no longer felt like her own.

It felt like something the Nonagon had whispered through Katherine. Something quietly planted inside her until it had seemed like common sense. The beast was keeping the Enforcers occupied. That much was true. Zeinai's revelations had turned everything else into a tangled knot she could no longer unravel. Nothing made sense anymore. She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe properly. A dull ache spread through the centre of her chest.

The photograph was still clenched in her hand, the paper crushed into deep creases by trembling fingers. Butter carefully smoothed it flat with a thread of Gloom. Her father. A much younger version of herself. She stared at them in silence. The room changed. It wasn't the pressure of the beast tearing through the lower levels. It wasn't the trembling of the collapsing facility. Something else had arrived. Something that had waited with infinite patience for this exact moment. Katherine was already there.