Chương 42: 41: The Common Hall

The Common Hall stretched beneath vaulted steel ceilings, a cavernous chamber kilometers from the battlefield where Butter had died. The Nest was so vast that most of its occupants hadn't even felt the shockwaves. Cold white light spilled from overhead panels onto rows of metal tables occupied by Magpie personnel. Enforcers, engineers, and scientists sat together in gray-and-black uniforms, masks removed while they ate, worked, or talked.

The hall carried the constant murmur of hundreds of overlapping conversations and the distant hum of machinery buried deep within the facility. In a far corner sat a cluster of trainees, teenagers and young adults still years away from becoming Steppers. They wore simpler gray uniforms without rank markings, their conversations louder and less restrained than the veterans around them. Some compared sparring results. Others argued over combat theory, engineering exams, or which Abomination was the strongest.

One boy absentmindedly shadowboxed while eating. Another girl worked through advanced mathematics on a tablet between bites of food. They were still in the long preparation stage. A decade or more of education, conditioning, combat training, psychological evaluation, and physical development before the Magpie Serum was ever introduced into their bodies. The serum amplified greatness. Strength, speed, intelligence, endurance, perception, willpower - everything was magnified roughly fiftyfold.

The stronger the human foundation, the greater the result. A mediocre recruit became a mediocre Stepper. An exceptional recruit became a monster. So they trained. Every exam mattered. Every kilogram lifted mattered. The future elites of the Syndicate sat laughing, studying, and arguing over dinner while, elsewhere in the Nest, wars were being fought and abominations were being contained. Life went on.

"I'm telling you, the simulations were wrong."

"They're always wrong."

"Not by six orders of magnitude." A group of enforcers debated combat projections over trays of food. Nearby, two engineers argued about reactor efficiency while passing a tablet back and forth. At another table, a woman absently ate with one hand while sketching gadget designs with the other, pages filled with miniature schematics, annotations, and impossible-looking mechanisms intended for whatever project had currently captured her interest. Thornburgh entered.

A few people glanced up before returning to their meals. Others noticed the head.

"Who's that?" someone muttered. A scientist looked over, shrugged, and returned to his food.

"No idea. Probably some random insurgent."

"Looks expensive."

"Everything's expensive." The conversation moved on to something else. A pair of engineers were busy discussing hard-light projector failures. A scientist complained about budget allocations. Someone laughed at a joke from three tables over. The woman drawing gadget designs flipped to a fresh page and continued sketching without looking up again. To most of them, it was just another day. Thornburgh looked less like a victor than a king returning from a crusade that had cost far more than anticipated.

His body was a map of slowly knitting wounds. Some cuts were physical. Others shimmered bruised violet beneath his skin where Clap had bitten into his soul. In his left hand, tangled in a fistful of white hair, hung the trophy. Butter's head. Alabaster skin looked almost waxen beneath the sterile lighting. Pink eyes remained open, fixed forever on some distant point. Violet burns marbled her temples and neck, the unmistakable marks of a kill that had demanded a terrible price.

He moved with measured deliberation, each step an act of will. The few people who bothered to pay attention noticed the state he was in more than the head itself.

"Damn." That came from an enforcer halfway through a meal.

"Looks rough."

"Whatever it was, I'm glad it wasn't my assignment." Several others nodded and continued eating. The Magpies were too large, their wars too numerous, for every death to matter equally. Somewhere, someone had been killed. Somewhere else, someone had done the killing. The machine continued turning regardless. Thornburgh walked deeper into the hall while conversations resumed around him, the endless hum of the Nest carrying on as though nothing extraordinary had happened at all....

At a steel table beneath the hall's largest light panel sat Korhess. Unlike the crowded tables around her, hers remained empty. Not by order, but by choice. Magpies passed nearby, spoke in lowered voices, and sat elsewhere. The First Antler had earned a strange sort of respect. Fear once. Respect now. Thornburgh stopped as he approached. Something about her looked wrong. The silk scarf was gone. The cobalt-and-gold masterpiece she had worn for decades lay folded neatly beside her tray like a retired banner.

Her honey-blonde hair was tied back in a simple tail. At her temples, partially hidden by loose strands, two velvet-covered antler nubs protruded openly. She had stopped shaving them. Before her sat a tray of greens, grass, hay, sliced apples, pears, walnuts, and almonds. She ate slowly, almost thoughtfully, jeweled fingers lifting a blade of grass with the same care another person might reserve for fine wine. This story has been stolen from Royal Road.

If you read it on Amazon, please report it His approach was silent, but she sensed him.

"Korhess," Thornburgh said, his cultured baritone rough with exhaustion.

"The First Antler. You feast alone. May I join you?"

"I suspect this fare would prove ill-suited to thy tastes." The voice that answered lacked its old theatrical flourish. More honest. Only then did she look up. Her mismatched eyes found Thornburgh. Then drifted lower. To his hand. The silver fork stopped halfway to her mouth. For the briefest instant, something flashed across her face. Disbelief. Gone an instant later beneath decades of practiced control. No one else in the hall knew whose head it was. Korhess did. Her stomach twisted. The fork lowered slowly.

"Thornburgh... what in Heaven's name art thou holding?" He placed Butter's head on the table with a soft thud.

"An intruder," Thornburgh said, lowering himself onto the bench with visible effort.

"An anomaly called Butter. She dismantled my conceptual regeneration, stripped it apart layer by layer. It cost me thirty-five percent of my true coherence to put her down." A faint violet wound pulsed beneath his suit.

"A worthy trophy. A definitive kill." Korhess stared at the head. The sight collided violently with memory - the infuriating grin, the mismatched prosthetic, the impossible way the girl treated reality like a negotiation instead of a law. Slowly, she looked up at Thornburgh. He had no idea what he'd done. Around them, the Common Hall continued as normal. Engineers discussed reactor yields. Scientists argued over dream extraction data. Enforcers traded stories from recent deployments. Korhess envied them.

They did not understand. Somewhere far beyond the walls, muffled explosions rolled through the Nest. Distant gunfire crackled. Metal screamed. Nobody paid it any mind. The facility stretched for kilometers in every direction. Half-finished experiments escaped daily. Enforcers hunted rogue creations. Laboratories detonated. Training accidents happened. Apis repaired the damage. The Nest endured. Korhess felt a cold knot form in her stomach.

Clock was still absent, buried somewhere in the depths of the facility, dealing with threats that would have annihilated lesser worlds. When he returned and discovered this, Apis wouldn't be able to repair the damage. Because Thornburgh hadn't won a battle. He'd turned a passing thunderstorm into a blood feud. And the storm's name was Clock. Korhess set down her fork with deliberate care.

"... I see." Her voice remained calm, though her stomach twisted.

"Then thou hast accomplished what I could not. I crossed blades with one of her companions. A most... burdensome encounter." The lie tasted like ash. Thornburgh grunted in satisfaction.

"I sought the Commander first. A kill of this magnitude deserves confirmation and recompense. Unfortunately, he is absent on retrieval duty." He waved a hand dismissively.

"So I came to eat." A gray service automaton glided silently to the table and deposited a colossal platter of roasted meat before him. Thick cuts bled across the plate beside marrow, root purée, and rich reduction sauces. A meal designed to rebuild a wounded monster. Thornburgh wasted no time. Knife scraped steel. Meat tore. Korhess returned to her grass.

"The war against the Antarctic outliers continues," Thornburgh said between bites.

"But this branch has been cut away." Korhess met his gaze.

"Indeed." A faint smile touched her lips.

"A most significant branch." You have not cut a branch, thou magnificent fool. Thou hast struck the roots. And worse, she thought, there was an uncomfortable chance the roots ran deeper than anyone understood. Crook. The Gloom-Dweller. The possibility still made her antlers ache. Butter had carried traces of both. In the impossible way disasters seemed to orbit her. In the way reality bent itself into knots around her existence. Korhess did not know how such a lineage could even be possible.

She did not want to know. Some questions were predators. Let the engineers speculate. Let the scientists dissect records. Let some other unfortunate enforcer chase that nightmare down. There were already plenty of abominations in the Nest. This one could be someone else's problem. For now. Yet the association lingered, and with it came a memory from the Sin War. Korhess remembered standing atop a shattered mountain ridge beneath a sky bruised purple and red by burning continents.

Below, an ocean of demons poured across the plains. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. An endless tide of claws, horns, fur, wings, and screaming mouths. Far beyond them, suspended among the clouds, hung a solitary figure. A shadow wrapped in an indigo cloak traced with silver fractal patterns that folded and shifted like impossible mathematics. His face was hidden. Only two thin white slits marked where eyes should have been.

Silver stained his hands and feet as though he had plunged them into liquid reality and never washed it away. Even from dozens of miles away, Korhess could feel him. Cold. The cold of a room that had forgotten sunlight existed. The demons rushed beneath him. He simply raised a hand. Their shadows peeled away from the earth. All of them. Darkness streamed upward into his palm, gathering into a writhing sphere blacker than night. The demons stopped running.

Their bodies shriveled in seconds, flesh collapsing against bone before crumbling into gray husks. Their shadows. Their souls. Taken together. The sphere compressed, then he flicked it. The projectile crossed miles instantly and struck a beast the size of a skyscraper. THOOOM. A hole the size of a house appeared through its chest. The monster stood frozen for a moment before its upper body collapsed inward and the rest followed, crashing across the battlefield. The slaughter continued.

With a casual motion, mountains rose from the earth. Buildings followed. Entire ridges tore free and hurtled through the sky like thrown stones, crushing demon armies miles away. Black chains erupted from behind him by the thousands, lashing across the battlefield like living serpents. Wherever they struck, bodies burst apart. Then he descended. Korhess remembered watching him land. Every footstep left behind a puddle of living Gloom.

Creatures crawled from those footprints - shadow-things with silver eyes and bodies of liquid darkness. Each step birthed more, each step releasing another pack into the war until the battlefield itself seemed to become his army. They spread outward immediately. Some sprinted across the earth faster than sound. Others ran through the sky as though gravity had forgotten them. Some dove into the ground and vanished beneath continents.

Korhess watched entire swarms scatter across the horizon toward distant battlefields in neighboring states while others crossed oceans. The war was global, and his creatures moved as though the planet itself were a small room. Wherever they arrived, demons died. Not only the great ones. The lesser horrors as well. Possessed wolves the size of tanks. Insects swollen to monstrous proportions. Beetles larger than houses. Centipedes tunneling beneath cities. Winged things made entirely of teeth and hunger.

The shadow-creatures hunted them all. And through it all, he saved people. Translucent gray barriers erupted around fleeing civilians moments before claws descended. Entire groups vanished in flashes of darkness and reappeared far beyond the battlefield. Soldiers who should have died simply weren't there when death arrived. Korhess saw a woman drive her battered car directly into a demon in a desperate attempt to save her children. The collision barely slowed it.

The creature dragged her from the wreckage and raised a claw to tear her apart. Then he looked at it. The demon froze. A hundred silver cuts appeared across its body. It fell apart into neat sections before Korhess even realized a weapon had been drawn. For the briefest instant she glimpsed swords orbiting him, thin silver lines moving too quickly for sight to properly follow. Then they were gone. The woman collapsed screaming.

"Monster!"

"The Shadow-God!"

"Beast!" Others echoed the cries. Some dropped to their knees. Some fled from him almost as desperately as they fled the demons. Yet none of them ran far. The moment his attention shifted elsewhere, the demons rushed back. And every time they did, he saved them again. Korhess followed from a distance, always watching and never approaching. Some demons died merely by entering his presence. Across vast regions around him, bodies suddenly folded inward as though crushed by an invisible hand. Bones shattered.

Flesh compressed. Entire creatures became bloody spheres before they ever touched the ground. The battlefield wasn't fighting him. It was being erased around him. Then he stopped. Turned. And looked directly at her. Miles separated them, yet it felt as though they stood face to face. Korhess stumbled backward. For one terrible instant she thought he had finally noticed her. Thought she was next. The white slits of his eyes narrowed. A voice entered her mind. Leave. A pause. I am about to destroy this place.

Korhess obeyed instantly. She crossed the length of a state in moments, fleeing farther than pride would ever allow her to admit. And still she saw it. A silver sun bloomed on the horizon. The explosion arrived afterward. The sound followed like the judgment of a dying world. The memory faded. Korhess stared down at her plate. If Crook truly had any connection to Butter, if the Gloom-Dweller had somehow played a role in her existence... Korhess took another bite of grass. The tree is awake, she thought.

And I suspect thou hast just slain its least troublesome branch.