Chương 41: 40: The Template

A sigh escaped him, heavy with resignation. When he spoke, the cultured baritone remained, but thinner now, scraped raw from within.

"I truly thought it would end with the maestro." His gaze drifted to the severed head in his hand.

"You were too strong. Another day, another circumstance, and I suspect this trail would have ended with your flourish rather than mine." His thumb brushed a strand of white hair aside. Thornburgh came to a stop and surveyed the corridor. Two Steppers had been reduced to ruin, a dead girl lay in a widening pool of blood, and cracked artifacts still hummed with the fading echoes of impossible power.

"And so the pendulum finds its rest." His dark gaze lingered on Katherine's unseeing eyes.

"A clash of titans would have been cleaner. Instead, we arrive here, amid spilled wine and shattered china. The song ends with a broken bow drawn across worn strings, its final note fading into silence. How... undignified." He lifted Butter's head slightly, as if showing her the aftermath.

"Your fuel is spent, little engine. Your conductor is silent. And the audience..." His eyes flicked once more to Katherine.

"... has already left the theater." A sigh.

"The track always circles back to its beginning; one beast walks away, the other nourishes the earth, and the river finds the sea whether it wills it or not." He stood there, a primordial killer in human shape, holding the head of a god slayer, overlooking the corpse of a girl who dreamed of batteries. Victory, and it still felt like hemorrhage.... In the spreading silence, broken only by the drip of Katherine's blood, a faint electronic hum stirred within the rifleman's corpse. His ruined helmet twitched.

One cracked lens remained fixed on the grisly trophy in Thornburgh's hand. A final diagnostic crawled through dying circuits. The lens focused on Butter's severed head. Cooling flesh. White hair. Violet burns. For a millisecond, the dead man's HUD flickered alive. SCAN INITIATED... TARGET: "BUTTER" (TERMINATED VESSEL) The lens sputtered. A storm of corrupted data spilled across its display as archived records and casualty logs bled together. Then a single line forced itself through the noise....

ASSASSINATION SUCCESS...... PRIMARY THREAT TERMINATION...... ESTIMATED RESPONSE WINDOW...... CLOCK IS LISTENING... The message dissolved into static. The hum died. The light went out. — Thornburgh's sigh faded into the silence. For a moment, he stood motionless. Then his gaze drifted upward, amber eyes distant with thought. Butter and her allies had been a persistent irritation for years. Branch by branch, cell by cell, they had chipped away at Syndicate holdings across the continent. Costly. Annoying.

Occasionally impressive. But now the maestro was dead. What happened next? He suspected very little. The Syndicate had not endured by trusting in singular lives. It trusted systems. Replication chambers waited beneath countless facilities. Every Stepper deployed into the field carried a contingency. A false twin grown in reserve. If the original died, suit telemetry and memory logs were uploaded into the waiting body. The soldier rose again. Another replacement was then prepared behind it.

The cycle continued until one hundred successful missions. Only then could a Stepper become an Operative. Operatives received no copies. They became Talons when they died. And Talons, if sufficiently valuable, could return as well. The machine consumed death and produced continuity. A recycling engine built from flesh, memory, and obedience. Butter had been powerful. She had also been foolish. Coming here alone had guaranteed this outcome. Some of the enforcers within these walls had trained for decades.

They had been born here, died here, and awakened again so many times that the distinction between life and deployment had become academic. No matter how many bodies she destroyed, the institution remained. His eyes narrowed slightly. Still. If it had been that one... The one they called W-9. Then perhaps the outcome would have been different. Thornburgh remembered a different problem. Years ago, in the long shadow of the Sin War, humanity became fascinated by the power demons once wielded.

Some sought relics, others bargains, and a few attempted replication. Eventually, someone succeeded. The first extraction produced what became known as the Gene Strains. Crude at first, then steadily refined, they spread into hundreds of variants. Some heightened the senses, others reshaped flesh, and a few altered the body so completely that the original human remained only as a faint suggestion beneath the transformation. Most recipients died. Enough survived. Among them rose a collective unlike any other.

They called themselves the Template. The name began as a joke, became a philosophy, then hardened into a nation. Thousands strong, they were predators wrapped in human skin. They wore every face, every ethnicity, every body type. Some favored wolves, others insects, and others forms that belonged more to nightmares than biology. They slipped through society unnoticed, changing identities as easily as changing clothes. For a time, governments tolerated them. The Template preferred isolation to conquest.

They crossed the deserts, withdrew from public view, and built a city called Oyge. It should never have existed. The desert bloomed around it. Rivers appeared where none belonged. Forests spread across land that should have remained barren. Within a few decades, they had terraformed an entire kingdom from dust and stubbornness. Peace lasted for a while. Then people began disappearing. The numbers climbed until investigations became unavoidable, and eventually the truth surfaced.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Some members of the Template had been hunting humans for food. The response was immediate. Arguments ended. Panic became policy. An experimental one-hundred-and-fifty-megaton weapon was dropped directly onto Oyge. The desert became a second sun. Observers watched the city vanish beneath expanding fire and declared the problem solved. Three weeks later, the Template seized Phoenix.

The entire city disappeared behind containment barriers and emergency quarantines while millions became hostages. The public never learned what had happened. Reports were buried, witnesses silenced, records erased. Conspiracy theories flourished, were ridiculed, then gradually faded from public memory. A month later, the crisis ended. Phoenix reopened. Life continued. People forgot. Then came the meteor. Every network covered it. Every government tracked it.

Experts around the world agreed the impact was inevitable. Then the meteor entered the atmosphere...... and simply came apart. One moment, a civilization-ending object existed. The next, the sky was empty. The public never learned why. The Syndicate did. They reviewed the footage frame by frame. The meteor had been carved apart by a blur of golden tails moving so quickly that most sensors recorded only the aftermath. W-9. Speculation persisted for weeks before dissolving into the background noise of history.

Conspiracy theorists, however, connected it to Phoenix, to Oyge, and to stories nobody was supposed to remember. Questions began circulating once more. Those questions, very unfortunately for the Template...... attracted W-9's attention. — Thornburgh remembered what happened next. That was where the story stopped being a security concern and became a horror story. The Syndicate didn't intervene. The Template wasn't their problem, so they simply watched.

Phoenix erupted into chaos as a thousand shimmering golden figures descended upon the city. W-9. Or rather, copies of her. Translucent constructs of living golden energy flooded the streets and skies. Featureless faces glowed beneath halos of liquid light while shifting geometric patterns flowed across their bodies like circuitry. They moved faster than light itself, tearing through buildings and crowds with the cruel curiosity of a cat toying with prey. The Template answered.

Ice storms buried districts beneath glaciers. Giants of living stone climbed into the clouds. Blood manipulators turned streets into crimson rivers. Gravity-warpers twisted skyscrapers into spirals. Thunder beasts erased city blocks with lightning. Reality-benders folded streets through themselves until Phoenix became a battlefield between nightmares. Among them stood one of the Template's strongest. The Locust. A towering man draped in black-and-emerald robes stitched with living vines.

Four translucent insect wings unfolded from his back, vibrating into shimmering blurs. BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT. Dark emerald chitin consumed his body, forming a segmented exoskeleton as multifaceted black eyes replaced his own. Then he multiplied. Again. Again. Until a million identical Locusts darkened the sky. Vines swallowed entire districts as the swarm descended. The golden clones met them head-on. The heavens erupted into gold.

Blinding streaks carved tunnels through the living cloud, erasing thousands of Locusts with every pass. Then W-9 arrived. Every camera turned toward her. She looked absurdly ordinary compared to the war consuming the city. She looked about twenty. A fitted white crop top clung naturally to her frame beneath a cropped crimson jacket, with black leggings hugging her legs. Long black hair fell in twin braids, a distinct white patch resting at her right temple.

Dark eyeliner framed bored golden eyes above dark plum lipstick, while a red crown-of-thorns tiara rested atop her head. A single golden bracelet circled each wrist and ankle, ceramic waist beads rested against her hips, and black claws tipped both her fingers and bare feet. A piece of gum snapped lazily between her teeth. She simply walked into a battlefield devouring an entire city as though crossing a quiet sidewalk. Dozens attacked at once. Ambushes. Traps. Beams. Curses. Gravity distortions.

Conceptual attacks. None reached her. Arms fell away. Heads separated. Bodies quietly came apart. W-9 never slowed. At first, Thornburgh assumed her tails had done it. The analysts reviewed the footage frame by frame. They hadn't. She had crossed the distance, killed every attacker, returned to her original position...... and resumed walking, another bubble of gum popping between her teeth before a single sensor realized she'd moved. Beams struck her. At least, they appeared to. Reality anchors washed over her.

Dimensional lances pierced her silhouette. Each attack passed harmlessly through the space she seemed to occupy. Her speed was so absurd that she appeared perfectly still even while weaving effortlessly between every assault. Then one of the Template's strongest entered the battle. A sword rested across his shoulder, its energy output suggesting enough force to carve through a planetary core. His transformation was already underway.

Dark fur spread across his body as predatory feline features emerged from an otherwise human face. Curved saber-like fangs pushed past his lips. Silver eyes narrowed into slits. Dense black stripes crawled across corded muscle. A long tail lashed behind him while claws carved furrows through the ruined street. He accelerated. The blade descended. W-9 moved for the first time. Her bare leg rose in a lazy kick...... and stopped. The city seemed to freeze around the image.

The enormous blade hung motionless between her toes. Golden eyes regarded the transformed swordsman with mild amusement as she held the weapon as effortlessly as someone might catch a falling leaf. The impact cratered the street beneath her supporting foot. Windows shattered for blocks. Shockwaves ripped through nearby buildings. W-9 never moved an inch. The sword remained trapped between her toes. She flexed. Snap. The weapon broke in half. The next frame showed the swordsman standing perfectly still.

The one after that made analysts believe the footage had corrupted. His own ribs protruded from his eye sockets. Several had been ripped clean from his torso and driven upward through his skull like ivory spikes. Others jutted from his mouth and throat. The broken half of his own sword had somehow ended up buried through his chest. Nobody saw it happen. Frame-by-frame analysis revealed only fragments.

W-9 had crossed the distance, torn the ribs from his body with her bare hands, driven them through his skull, impaled him with his own weapon, then returned to exactly where she had started. She resumed walking. Another bubble of gum popped between her teeth. The corpse remained standing for almost a full second before collapsing. What followed unsettled even the Syndicate analysts. W-9 simply wasn't there anymore. The feed lagged, then corrected itself. The battlefield had fallen silent.

The sky, moments ago blackened by a million Locusts, was clear once more. The deafening drone of countless wings had faded into a few dying echoes on the wind. Template members lay scattered across streets and rooftops in neat sections, as though some impossible surgeon had reduced an army of monsters into anatomical diagrams. Flesh, bone, chitin, fur, and shattered armour carpeted the ruins. Nothing moved. The feed struggled to process the scene. The cloaked drone spun frantically. W-9 stood directly behind it.

The drone was microscopic, invisible, buried beneath layers of concealment technology designed to evade entities capable of tracking satellites from orbit. She had found it anyway. Molten golden eyes stared directly into the lens as though the camouflage simply didn't exist. A bubble of gum popped.

"Get my good side." She vanished again. The footage descended into madness. W-9 ricocheted across the city in a blur of impossible acrobatics, running along walls, flipping between collapsing buildings, folding through gaps no human should fit through, and twisting around attacks with effortless, dancer-like grace. Beams crossed spaces she'd occupied fractions of a moment earlier. Gravity distortions missed by centimetres. Blades carved empty air as she bent, spun, and contorted through storms of destruction.

She bounded across rooftops on all fours, clearing entire city blocks in single leaps. At one point she launched herself through a skyscraper, vibrated until matter lost meaning, phased through dozens of floors without damaging a single wall, tore someone apart, then exited through the opposite side while the building remained perfectly intact. The drone had been designed to track entities capable of instant travel and teleportation. It still struggled to follow her. Instead, it followed the screaming.

Template members crashed through skyscrapers. Cars became clubs. Tornadoes swallowed entire districts. Icebergs erupted through intersections. Buildings collapsed. Wherever the camera turned, golden flashes danced through the carnage. The clones fought simultaneously across the city, carving through armies, darting between attacks, and turning every battlefield into a slaughterhouse. W-9 flipped through the air and landed atop a gigantic Gene-User.

The draconic humanoid towered over the battlefield, bronze scales stretched across bulging muscles, curved horns sweeping back from its skull as molten light leaked between clenched fangs. One arm already hung ruined, its fist shattered from striking her moments earlier. Her toe claws buried into its chest. Her fingers sank into its eyes. She pulled. The giant split cleanly from skull to groin in a spray of scales, flesh, and bone. She was already gone before the halves struck the street.

The screaming only grew louder. One Template member finally broke and ran. The drone climbed after him as two blurs tore around the city, reducing entire blocks to streaks of motion before diving just in time to catch them. The fleeing Gene-User had become something lean and lupine, auburn fur stretched over a wiry frame built for speed. Jagged horns lined his brow and jaw while grey eyes with pinprick pupils darted wildly.

"My skin rejects all attacks!" he roared. W-9 smiled.

"My claws are blessed by Death itself. Literally." Black claws flashed. They cut through him anyway.

"Don't run," she said.

"I'll get you anyway." She passed him without slowing. His spine came with her. The rest collapsed behind. A colossal shark-like woman slammed into the battlefield next, turquoise scales glistening as her impact carved a crater through the street. She charged. W-9 was already behind her. The woman looked down. Her abdomen had opened. Intestines spilled across the pavement, the glistening trail leading to W-9, who casually held them in one hand. Flick. The woman launched into the upper atmosphere.

Only later did analysts discover she'd already been sliced into dozens of pieces. Reality simply hadn't caught up yet. Then W-9 seemed to grow bored. The drone increased its frame rate. A coherent light cannon lanced across the skyline. W-9 stepped onto the beam, sprinted along it like a tightrope, reached its user... One swipe. A head separated from its shoulders. She disappeared again. The footage dissolved into chaos. Flying Gene-Users blinked into the upper atmosphere only to return as falling pieces.

Others fled for space, but golden flashes caught them first, kicking them back toward Earth like burning comets. Some teleported. They arrived already cut apart. Others crossed dimensions, phased through reality, or attempted hyperspace jumps. It didn't matter. W-9 was always there first. When the footage finally stabilized, the battle was over. Every member of the Template was dead. The hostages remained alive. Golden energy erupted from W-9 like a second sunrise, sweeping across Phoenix in a radiant tide.

Gene-User corpses dissolved into drifting motes of light as civilians were restored. Burns faded. Wounds closed. Broken bones knit together. Blood vanished from the streets. Then the city healed. Cracks sealed. Ruined roads mended. Flowers, grass, and vines burst through shattered pavement as life reclaimed the battlefield in waves of emerald and gold. W-9 stood at the center of it all, eyes closed, breathing softly. Healing the body was simple. Healing the mind demanded a different price.

Fear drained from trembling faces. Panic ebbed. The haunted look in every survivor's eyes softened as invisible burdens lifted away. Grief, terror, anguish, every scream, nightmare, and memory of that day flowed from the civilians and gathered around her instead. She carried it all herself. Destruction and restoration. A perfect balance. Thornburgh's thoughts returned to the present as he stood in the ruined corridor. Fortunately for the Syndicate... W-9 had not been the one who came to this facility.