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Save Point: On Deck

Terminal Platform

Kilseth has just started with seriously beating on Sethkill, fists to the face and all, when Cleo hurtles out of the window in the sky that has opened unseen above him and kicks in the back of the neck, fancy golden armour with trademarks on it be damned. There's a series of articulated plates there, there have to be to allow him to move his head, and the impact propagates through the jointed plates to attack his spinal chord at the highest vertebrae.

He_roars,_ ferociously, turning about to lunge and stagger at her as Terrowne slithers through his own portal after her with the native grace of something born in the deeper reaches of twisted space-time, tentacles extended to hold the aperture open and give him speed and direction. A leading, fully extended carnassial of a ripclaw catches Kilseth across the exactly opposite side of the neck from where Cleo hit him, hooking him and dragging him down and off balance as the Dragon casually backflips off him and slams to the deck in a symmetrical swirl of tentacles like an alien craft making its landing, or an octopus descending on a small fish that never saw it coming.

Kilseth turns again, as behind him Cleo draws her sword, that sword made using an unknown technology by the ancestors she never knew she had, and then swings it harder than Terrowne has ever seen her wield it before, blurring into a multiphasic sweep across the local time-lines with the new skills she never even knew were possible. It's the same cheap shot that Kilseth took at his brother forever ago in what was supposed to be just an exhibition match, but instead of jealousy and hate, there is in her fiery eyes only the desire that this be ended for once and all.

She hits him so hard the unbreakable blade shatters. Razor-edged fragments fly out in a spray, briefly reflecting their surrounding as they embed point-first into the exotic matter of the deck or bounce away spinning like shrapnel. She is left staring in amazement at the empty hilt in her hand.

Kilseth is picked up by the force of the blow and slung across the deck, sliding and grating as the protrusions in his armor catch on the surface. In front of his vision, error messages are appearing and multiplying across the board, as the unstoppable force encounters the immovable object and the rules get redefined. The armor is made of the same material as the deck, it should be invulnerable to all conventional attacks, and yet that fucking cat has cut all the way through it, slicing through all sorts of critical structures before the blade exploded like a grenade inside the outer shell. He can feel the shrapnel moving inside his abdomen. Parts of the armour are changing color in random and incoherent ways as the malfunctioning active camo, which he wasn't even planning to use except to make himself look cool, loses contact with bits of itself and tries to compensate.

If it was just a conventional nanosuit, it'd be patching itself back together by now, but this is the special armor, the invulnerable stuff, solid-state plates of covalence-enhanced hyperfiber and exotic matter assembled particle-by-particle. It isn't supposed to be breakable! He slams his fist on the deck underfoot with a scraping spray of sparks.

Cleo looks at the remnant grip of her sword for a moment, then sheathes it using what's left of the base of the blade, tying the narrow leather cords known as a 'peace-bond' around the tang to ensure it stays in place.

She remembers the letter from her mother, the earliest and simplest versions of the ideograms on a plain piece of paper that was all she ever had to know her. The sword is your spirit, it cannot be broken unless you are, is the bit she always remembered, but now she recalls the following line, the other piece to it. But if you can break the sword, you're strong enough that you don't need it anymore.

This has to be what it meant. The slit pupils of her eyes contract as she ignites multiphasic flames around her entire body, blazing like swords from her hands, like the cutting lances of white light the Dragon creates in battle.

Kilseth is clawing his way to his feet, only in the confusion, everyone has forgotten Sethkill, who has already managed to get up and is unfolding something in his hands, an object, Terrowne realizes, that must have been made using the same technology as Cleo's sword, because that's the only loose end left that could explain it. The inexplicable remains they found at the Schnackenberg Cave weren't part of the place itself, they must have belonged to a traveller that was caught in the attack and made it as far as the ruins before expiring, perhaps drawn by the remains of the portal network, or thrown clean through the weak point it created, as though caught inside an exploding building whilst standing in front of a window.

Sethkill unfolds the object they called the hell-crown, because no other name seemed suitable. It stretches impossibly in his grasp, starting out as a heavy and dense ring-shaped piece of jewellery decorated with clear diamond-like crystals on peculiar curved stalks that stretch outward and forward in a seemingly random pattern, then pulling out thinner and thinner to the point where it seems so slender and fragile that the narrow spars of it could never even support their own weight. The pieces of it slide and move, even the crystals becoming larger and peculiarly lit from the inside as they somehow become less dense. In a matter of seconds, the object has become the splendidly shimmering crown that Terrowne remembers seeing briefly in the Schnackenberg cave, worn by the etiolated remains of a desiccated skeleton with glorious leathery eye-patterned wings.

Or has it? Because now that he looks at it more closely, now that he has more reference to go by, there is something about the shape of it that resembles the slender, symmetrical 'neural clip' headsets that the sethura use to interface with their virtual technologies. And what he thought were decorative diamonds, or something similar, look like some form of logic crystal, complete with the photonic shimmer trickling through from the inside that indicates that they are performing a vast number of calculations per second. But what could possibly require that much processing power, when even the most sophisticated device only requires a small wafer the size of a fingernail? The entire Island of Infang was shuffled between realities using a small block you could hold in one hand!

He has his answer when Sethkill hastily hooks the crown around his horns, having to exploit some of the open spaces in the latticework to make it fit, and jams it down onto his head, pushing inward from the sides to recompress the structure enough to make it fit between his up-pointed ears. As soon as it gets close enough to his skull, and more importantly to his ever-so-slightly damaged brain, the spars and points of the crown begin to twist and writhe, adjusting themselves into new positions and folding up and down accordingly, trying to map themselves to his underlying neural topology. The logic crystals begin to light up, more and more, faster and faster until they shine.

Terrowne can only imagine what is going on inside Sethkills mind as the hell-crown attempts to interface with a mind entirely different to whatever it was originally designed to handle. The baseline calibration for a neural clip supposedly took several minutes at least, although in all honesty he never actually saw the process himself, and that was with settings specifically designed for the sethura mind after generations of study. This device, whatever it is, seems to be establishing basic protocols within seconds.

Sethkills eyes begin to physically glow and shimmer as the proteomic systems within his pupils are co-opted into whatever process is occurring, generating abstract patterns and complex symbols mapped out in tiny specks of light. Suddenly he straightens himself up in a peculiar way neither Cleo nor Terrowne has ever seen before, with a motion that is uncanny in its perfection and accuracy, devoid of little variations and inconsistencies that accredit a true natural and living thing. Before, he was swaying slightly and his stance was loose from the exhaustion of his joints in everything they've done and seen today.

Now, precision is restored.

Sethkill doesn't say anything. Not a damned thing. He just attacks.

~*~

Kilseths supply of important but disposable minions, his high command of viciousness, self-interest and greed, have been briefly caught off-guard by the sudden reversal, just as their master was supposed to win and they were all supposed to become gods over the universe for all time or something, but they're definitely not out just yet and have no intention of quitting. The official plan calls for no use of high energy weapons aboard the platform, which squats like a spiked echinoderm driven into the delicate flesh of reality, but in practice this means that they are all packing and ready to shoot each other in the back.

However, they were expecting a conventional last-ditch resistance, not this. The Dragon is full up on shadows at long last and ready to strike, and the Firekat has gained the knack to phase around and through their attacks, like bullets passing futilely through a rising spear of flame. They shelter in the doorways and access ports that lead deeper inside the structure, to its vulnerable core and engineering, but it's nowhere near enough. Cleo hurls flames at them in a slingshot barrage, keeping them down with suppressing fire, and the Dragon does things that are impossible to describe. Tentacles reach impossible distances through nothingness and haul them out into the line of fire, shadows grab at them and cut like blades, and time shifts to accommodate its violence. Here, at the center, anything is on the verge of possibility and it benefits them in a way the fixed laws of physics never could.

Between attacks they strike at the platform itself. The shell and deck are made of the same exotic materials and verge on indestructibility, but the inner workings are still vulnerable in the way any high-tolerance device is and can be disrupted by the simple expedient of beating on them enough. Closing the outer doors would keep them safe, but the loyalty of Kilseths inner circle to their master is their undoing, as they keep triggering the locks to open and try and defend him, only to catch hell and darkness. As long as Cleo and Terrowne simply keep shooting, they can hold the arena indefinitely. The design seems to assume that any attackers will be trying to get in, rather than keep everyone else out.

~*~

In the open centre of the deck, Sethkill is going after his brother once and for all with a savagery that has to be seen to be believed. The crown seems to have repaired in its entirety the damage to his mind, or possibly is just providing some sort of work-around for the missing pieces, but it hasn't stopped there and seems to be determined to optimize every function it can access, bringing to his thoughts a sort of terrible clarity.

Suddenly his co-ordination is perfect, his actions mirroring perfectly the desires of his mind almost faster than he can think, and he can see the outcomes of every movement even as he undertakes it. As in when he sways slightly to the right, then twists left and drives his fist into the injured section of Kilseths armour, and hears him howl screamingly around the blow as tiny pieces of fragmented blade are driven in deeper.

The magic is lighting up his mind too, the ability to manipulate baseline reality, and suddenly he can see, where it was obscured, how it all works. It's just so obvious, really. What Kilseth worked out over years with mathematics and the sort of heavy engineering that destroys whole economies, comes to him naturally as the structures akin to neurons inside his brain fire, all at once, triggering the quantum interfaces deep inside the structures of the cells that support consciousness. Instead of changing his thoughts using the properties of the universe, he is changing the universe using the properties of his thoughts.

He wraps a simple linear displacement of forces, the same thing he used long ago on that first day when he was crossing the desert, only this version warps space itself, causing torsion damage on contact. He tests it out by grabbing Kilseths descending forearm on the right and then countering with a swift upward knee from the left, buckling the material of his chest-plate and further compromising the cuirass.

He thinks of so many things he could say, but they're pointless, all of them pointless, and he can see exactly how it would go. Kilseth will still be alive after he speaks and Keselt will still be dead, so he says nothing and looks to correct the oversight. As Kilseth tries to defend against the repeated impacts to his chest, Sethkill takes advantage of his hunched over pose, as he gasps in pain, and levers him bodily up into the air against the artificial gravity of the platform, finding that it's not really so hard at all. He spares a moment to look at his brother, really look, and finds him not so different than himself, just deeply, deeply defective.

Then he throws him headfirst at the floor with a nasty crunching sound. All those flat heavy plates, so cleverly interlocking and supporting, woven about with software and hardware, do nothing to defend the wetware inside. Kilseth is faster and stronger than any normal sethura, has upgraded his body by merging with the remains of a failed transcendant that somehow lived aeons beyond its time, but he is still made of flesh and can die like any other.

It is his assumption that he cannot die that is his weakness.

Sethkill slides into a floor-level scissor kick and puts his entire body-weight behind another kick to Kilseths ribs where the shrapnel from the sword is still lodged deep inside him and is yet to be expelled. With his every movement accelerated, the massive impact sends Kilseth rolling across the deck clutching futilely at his side, snarling and gagging.

He's starting to look afraid. He's starting to panic.

Trying to scramble away on three limbs, no longer able to ignore the damage to his body, Kilseth manages to make some distance as Sethkill gracefully stretches back up into a standing position and starts to stroll towards him with a sort of inexorable motion. Gasping, he frees up his other hand and reaches out into the air, attempting to open another portal, this time to a much closer location.

Sethkill doesn't even hurry. He just keeps going. The portal opens, a distorted blurring twist in front of them, and Kilseth howls as he braces himself and then tears open his injured side even further by throwing himself into it. Instead of it closing behind him, however, Sethkill extends his own arm, the artificial one replaced with carbon steel and ceramics, and holds the aperture open in a swirl of tidal forces that would be deadly to flesh but which only tear and burn at the artificial limb, causing it to shed faint blue radiation where excess energy spills over.

Kilseths destination, visible through the gap, is the central chamber inside the sea urchin shape of the platform, only a few tens of meters beneath the surface they were fighting on just moments before, but completely inaccessible from it. It seems that he's decided to accelerate his schedule for trying to become god of this universe, a demiurge with unlimited powers to reshape all things and deceive himself accordingly. That he knows he could be stopped and is trying to hurry the thing up is a sad testament to the failure of his insane vision, a fundamental indication of its flaws.

Sethkill vaults through the opening head first, using the hand of steel to grip the edge of it like a fence rail and direct himself fluidly straight through the center as he releases the portal behind him and casually discards it back into non-existence. When he hits the floor, he rolls neatly and smoothly from his arms onto the curve of his shoulders, keeping the frenetically flickering crown from so much as making contact with the surface.

The crown is an obvious weakness, if it could be torn from his head, but the blades of it are wrapped firmly around his horns and muzzle, trying to maintain exact position, and Kilseth is a little distracted by his own landing, which was much less graceful. He's leaving a trail of dark blood behind him as he claws his way up onto a sort of plinth in the exact center-point of the room, not very much, just large heavy drops and spatters, but it's clearly a very long time since anything really managed to hurt him enough to draw blood. Sethkill could almost feel sorry for him, but he holds close the memory of Keselt bleeding around the purple-hued iridium blade that Kilseth drove into her back, and pushes away any thoughts of mercy.

Atop the plinth is structure resembling a votive altar, but distinctly technological, in praise of making over doing, symmetrical such that it rises from the floor and descends from the ceiling, leaving a conspicuous open point of focus in the middle. The altar is wrapped with complex patterns of various metals, something that looks like electrical copper, bands of excited neon optical fibers and slender struts of logic crystal similar to those in the crown. Looking out-of-place around it are several very simple levers, just drop-hammered cold-forged bars, designed to be pulled outwards and physically trigger a basic mechanism of some kind, repeated three times over in different cardinal directions.

Kilseth coughs and hacks, clutching at his side, then manages to crawl over to one lever and throws his weight bodily against it, causing himself even more pain as the impact makes him feel all his existing injuries twice over. All the levers suddenly move, and a sort of diagonally laced, circularly interwoven cage made of the same iridescently metallic exotic matter as the rest of the platform suddenly drops from the roof overhead, crashing to the floor with a massive impact to completely surround him on all sides.

Sethkill guesses the barrier is supposed to act as some sort of faraday cage for whatever effect Kilseth is trying to achieve, but he's deployed it with the desperation of someone trying to get a portcullis door between themselves and the attacking monster. Around the perimeters of the chamber, previously unseen hatches open, and then suddenly the artificial gravity inside the volume fails, presumably to reduce any interference with Kilseths final play. Neon bands about the outer walls, matching the ones on the central altar, are the only source of light in the room and cast strange shadows as their light passes through the diagonal grilles of the cage.

Without warning, seven of Kilseths elite personal guard launch themselves into the chamber, one for each of the hatches that are positioned with seven-fold symmetry around the edges of the circular chamber. The opened hatches reflect some sort of essential mechanical process, with interlocked teeth unlocking in a short abrupt movement, then the main cover opening more slowly by way of some sort of actuator. The elite killers are just an added extra, taking their advantage of the event to take one final stab at protecting their leader and hanging onto their chance to become very minor deities.

Sethkill knows better. Like Kilseth would ever share if he could possibly help it. He hasn't even bought his own wife or daughter along, just the individuals he deems expendable for purposes of his own defense. But the ferocious blind loyalty of his followers knows no sanity after all they've done in search of this ultimate accomplishment.

The elite killers are wearing very flash-looking thin-layer combat armour, black naturally, and waving around more of the purple-bladed daggers that offend him so very much. He decides to indulge himself, and take them out. With the perfect clarity imparted by the crown, there are any number of ways he could avoid them entirely, but he wants to see what Kilseth will do as finally watches all his options being shut down around him.

He incapacitates each of them with a single hit. They are expecting the advantage of surprise, of numbers, of the sudden loss of gravity, but he leaps straight at them off the surface of the grille, and the surprise is theirs as he goes directly for their throats. He kicks the first one so hard that his neck snaps on impact.