Book 8. Chapter 94: Desperate Attempts |
She had been smart in handling her restrictions. She hadn’t talked to me about killing Wrath just to convince me to give up. She’d been doing so to make it all about Wrath and I rather than the world and herself.
Building it up so that she was justified in smite Wrath out of the air before she made it here. Turning it into a last second heroic pause in the action.
The problem is that there had to be a real chance of bringing out an actual tragic ending if I failed. And that’s what Relinquished was actually after. She changed the victory conditions of our duel. Now, if she killed Wrath, she’d have narrative reason to gloat about a win and run the fuck away from me before I could figure out how to break past her shield.
Superior! I sent over, in panic. No time to even fully ask what I needed.
It’s not ready yet! That last barrier is godsdamned pure power as far as we can tell, we need to figure out how to cram the same amount of power in this spear, that's our best-
I snapped a hand forward, aimed at Relinquished. No time.
The god-killing spear manifested before me, plucked straight from the workshop where a few dozen Superiors were busy weaving the concepts together in the digital sea. And I hoped by some miracle, Superior and his local cluster of copies managed to cram that power in the right ways to punch through like an anti-armor shell. I already knew deep inside it wasn't ready, and might never be ready. This direction might be a dead end all this time, but I was desperate.
The spear was pulled free from the mite lantern, drawn into the world like the other ones, still malformed, the concepts spinning away within, exposed to the air.
Her eyes snapped in my direction. But her finger remained on target.
A beam of light struck out of her finger. An instant later, my spear slammed into her first barrier, broke past the ones we had already researched and slammed into the current one that still held against us, ripping itself apart once power had drained away from it.
I hadn’t been fast enough, and the spear hadn’t been enough either. The shockwave of air blasting away from her finger now reached me, but I hardly felt it.
Far above, I could see that beam impact the burning comet coming down at us. It continued to burn, too small for me to see Wrath’s mangled body break apart.
Relinquished turned my way. “Alas, my dear…” A wicked smile filled with sadistic glee stretched across her face. “You are too late.”
I saw the comet far above break into smaller lights, burning through the atmosphere.
“I warned you, did I not? I try so hard to be merciful to you humans, to make your end painless even. And yet all I get is scorn and-”
Her eyes widened, then she whirled around, finger pointed right back up into the air.
My head went through everything in a single second, jumping across the logical train: If Relinquished was aiming for a second hit, it meant the first one hadn’t killed Wrath.
Adrenaline surged through me at all once at the realization, reaching out to Superior at the same time with only two words: FIRE EVERYTHING!
Superior hadn’t been tinkering on a single spear at a time, we had a small infinity of dimensions, all forming up and fading off as we branched away from timelines that were growing too distant.
I funneled every last bit of research Superior had done, all into one single timeline. And began to throw them at Relinquished as quickly as I could fully manifest them, working in teams.
Dozens of spears were launched at her position. All of them slightly modified. My original spear had been the best possible attempt, and if that hadn’t worked, then I knew all of these other prototype tests wouldn’t either.
But they might make her flinch.
Some broke against her first layer of defense completely. Others passed through like ghosts before they halted against a layer they weren’t built to penetrate.
It didn’t matter. I’d overwhelm her with numbers in the same way she’d tried to crush me earlier.
“Nothing more than futile attempts from a lost man, Winterscar.” She laughed, hiding within her shell of protection. “Now, watch as she burns.”
She locked her finger once more at To’Wrathh far above. A pulse of occult rippled free, a beam of bright blue flared out into life, racing straight for the star deorbiting from above.
Superior and I had the exact same idea at the exact same time. My own hand turned right up, tracking the beam of occult, still sailing straight on target. My other hand sliced down with Talen’s blade.
The wave of division I launched wasn’t for her unbreakable shield. It was for the base of her beam. And it cut straight through, separating the power. The rest of the beam continued forward, but it no longer had anything behind it.
At the same time, I worked with what I had.
I had made these spears with speed in mind. They would lance out far faster than a bullet. And slide through the air as if it weren’t there. And within each spear, they were built to break apart everything - including occult.
My spear lanced forward, a thin line of blue racing out into the air - chasing after her attack. I held my breath, hoping my spell would be faster.
An occult detonation blew up… far before Wrath’s position. I’d intercepted her attack.
Relinquished snarled and once more opened fire.
I turned and equally worked on slapping down beam after beam. Using up every prepared spear the Superiors had funneled into this single timeline.
We diverged far too much now from all the other Keiths. I felt them peel away from my touch like shedding layers. This timeline was now the one where every Superior had already given their spears into a few seconds ago.
Every other timeline had their set of spears collected already, and the more we pooled those into a single timeline, the more finite things became.
I’ll get to work on making new ones, I’ll focus them on speed and occult nullification. Superior sent, getting to work with the smaller infinity we had left here.
Relinquished tried her best to cut Wrath down. And each time she tried a spell, I’d cut it out of the air faster than it could reach out, like a deranged point defense turret, blowing up her missiles before they got close to their real target.
She turned her head to me, fury all over. And her hand once more raised in my direction, sending everything she could to make me flinch in my own defense.
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I held her off, and fought back.
It was a struggle on multiple fronts. I knew if I didn’t cut her to the core somehow right now, Wrath was going to die the moment she slammed into Relinquished like a suicide bomber. And if I didn’t focus on cutting away the firepower Relinquished sent at Wrat from here, she’d die anyhow, failing to reach her target.
She’d survived one full hit from Relinquished at this distance, but I had no idea what she was using to do that. Defense flares, or perhaps a sacrificial armor held ahead of her that took the blow and ripped into pieces. Regardless, the more I saved her from using her defenses, the better.
On the goddess’s side, she had to kill Wrath or get caught in the trap - or kill me before the same.
Wrath was getting near now, past the low atmosphere. I could see her now as a black dot in the sky, zooming straight for Relinquished.
Out of time. Superior sent, and I could feel his sorrow deep within.
He’d long since diverged from me when it came to relationships. He saw Wrath the same way I had long ago, as an oddball of a friend. Spending time together in Capra’Nor, visits and games around her city as she proudly showed off her new iron tight rule that was a lot less iron tight and more friendly with each citizen directly.
But I’d been with Wrath for longer. I’d seen everything.
That crazy toaster wasn’t going to die today, not so long as I was still here to do anything about it.
I pulled in deep from Urs’s memories, and demanded Superior to work on the original prototype spear again. The spear that had been the hardest to build, and was the closest to breaking her shields. He and a small army of others could stop their current construction and focused on weaving the concepts together, building the spear back up from what they had made before.
If I do that, we’ll run out of spears to stop her attacks in under a minute at this rate. Superior sent. And that spear hadn’t broken through her last barriers, it's a dead end. We can't fit that kind of power inside it anymore than you can cram an airspeeder in a bucke-
DO IT. I screamed back. I had a plan, and when Superior saw it, he realized it might still have a chance at working. An all-or-nothing gamble.
They shifted their priority, abandoning the creation of all the other simpler spears, in order to once more focus on correctly weaving together a single killing one.
And while they were busy, I and every other Keith I could bring together worked on a singular goal.
If Superior hadn't been able to make the right spear, then the answer had to come from somewhere he didn't know of: Urs and Talen's knowledge.
Urs hadn’t simply given me his memories and skills. He’d given me everything he was. Allowed his entire soul to be subsumed by mine. All his pains, his history, his successes and his mistakes. Even right down to his time in his garden, simply watering his new crop of plants.
And within those memories was his work on the fractals to empower and magnify Tsuya’s terraforming platform main cannon. To empower something already strong and magnify it.
Which is exactly what this spear needed.
Those were still just fractals in the end. Concepts. I dug them out, and wove them forward ahead of me, using Talen’s skill in manifesting concepts. Holding the patterns Urs had designed out and projected before me.
Creating a tunnel, with Relinquished directly on the other end of that barrel. Occult crackled in front of me, and I demanded it to bend to my will like Talen had learned to do over an entire life spent fighting.
I’ll cover Wrath. Superior sent, and the mirror fractal triggered within me, still holding on for dear life within the inside of the shredded armor I wore.
Hundreds of his ghosts flew off, each diving at Relinquished, forcing her aim off or outright eating her attacks.
Strikes meant to break both matter and soul as they fired. Relinquished wanted Wrath dead.
She screamed in frustration. Wrath was now right here, rocketing straight for us both.
One final spear. I took what Superior crafted, drew it out from the digital sea he’d built it in, manifested it within the world, held within my right hand like a bolt of barely contained lightning. With my other hand, I raised Talen’s blade straight at Relinquished.
Occult patterns glowed ahead of me, a tunnel build and prepared, floating in the air by my will. An array that would take a single spear I threw through it, and magnify it the same way Resolve did.
Her last barrier required pure power to break through. Then I'd godsdamned do exactly that.
The fractals before me fully triggered, the array aligned. And it began to draw everything from me all at once. Urs's shields flickered off ahead of me, breaking apart, leaving me completely exposed. My soul burned. Resolve flared out, repairing myself against the damage. Pain grabbed a hold through me, my skin breaking apart into ash only to reform. But the array wasn’t ready yet, it needed more power.
I felt myself fall down on one knee as the fractals demanded more than I could give it.
This was what Talen would have done on the station. And if he could do it, so could I.
I snarled and slowly got back up on my feet as power crackled and tore through my skin, muscles, bone and soul. Resolve pulsed within, and I fed it every emotion I had, channeling it into the final array ahead of me. Holding onto the spear manifested in my right hand steadily, so that when I threw it, I would not miss.
Ahead, Relinquished had two choices: Attack me with everything she had in an attempt to disrupt whatever I was doing, or focus on breaking through Superior’s torrent of ghosts and half-formed defenses in order to smite down her daughter.
If she had even thrown a token attack in my direction, my focus on building Urs’s array would have broken down. I was as exposed as I could be, I had no defenses and would stay that way rooted in place until the array was fully charged.
She could have won right here. A single finger in my direction while I held against the weight of the world on my shoulders and struggled to simply keep breathing.
Relinquished saw it, and I knew she could tell I was as open as I'd ever be to being slaughtered by her hand. She'd won. That final barrier couldn't be broken without the array at best, and that array would get me killed unless someone else was keeping her attention locked on them.
But I had a chance. One thing I was gambling hard on:
She'd made killing Wrath and making me witness it the win condition.
I held the ground and committed to the array, fully focused on charging it. If I was wrong about Relinquished and the blindspot she'd forced herself into, then I was dead and the world was done for.
Relinquished snarled, hand twitching with the desire to simply point at me and end it. A moment later, she gave one last furious scream, and turned her full attention to Wrath.
Superior’s ghosts broke apart against her full focus and anger. Swaths were ripped aside by a wave of her hand, as if clearing cobwebs. Blast after blast was thrown at Wrath in the last seconds before impact. She was seething. She knew what edge case I'd just abused against her.
Superior handled the defense with every spear he and the other alternative dimensions of himself had built up till now.
And then he ran out of spears. She could tell immediately when we had tapped the well dry.
“HAH! YOUR GAMBLE HAS FAILED YOU!” She screamed, triumphant. “WITNESS MY VICTORY!”
The magnification array hadn’t been fully charged yet. But I was out of time. I launched the spear through the array of fractals right then and there.
Superior tried his best, occult dome after dome, but he wasn’t Talen or Urs. He was me. The older version of me, before both gods had given up everything. He was better at defense then I had been given his experience with the mites and his current life beyond a body - but deep down he was still a mortal against a goddess.
The beam Relinquished launched burned through every defense he could build, and blasted through. And I saw that strike continue to fly true, straight at Wrath.
All I could hope, was that my final strike would cut her down here and now, so that her power would break apart and fragment without a focus behind it anymore. That was all that could save Wrath.
The spear flew true ahead of me.
Power unlike anything I felt grabbed that spear as it flew between the array ahead, and magnified a hundred fold. I was blasted backwards off my feet by the mere proximity of the departing spear.
When it left the array, it was so dense, it outright blinded me despite Resilience keeping my body near invincible.
A single line of pure unyielding power, slicing into the panicked defense of the goddess before me.
It cut through shield after shield, and finally collided against the barrier the original version had failed against over and over.
This time, it had come with the power needed.
The enemy shield held, but so did the spear. Crackling rage, the tip slowly breaking through the dome. Caught for a second.
She turned on herself, her attack halting. Staring at the spear breaking through her final defense. Calculating what she could do to protect herself.
And for the first time in this entire battle, and her entire life, she was reduced to a common footsoldier trying to avoid death in the most basic manner possible: Not being in the way.
The spear broke through her final shield and speared straight through her position.
It sank through her body, cut a hole directly on her chest, and missed her soul fractal by an inch, all because she’d dodged within the time the spear had taken to break through. She had gone through all the possible ways to survive, and found no other option.
I didn't have the energy in me to even hiss. Speed had been the issue, if the spear wasn't faster than instant death, she would either escape with the unity fractal or do exactly what she'd done here and take a step off to the side the moment the spear stuttered against the final barrier.
Which meant even with Urs's array, it wouldn't have been enough to kill her. Not by itself.
But it had been the closest to true death the goddess had ever come to. And that thought rattled through her head in the same way a Feather failing their name would.
She was a goddess. And she'd been forced to escape death like a mortal would have.
Her head slowly looked down at the open hole in her shell. Then back up to stare at me, internally reeling.
And then Wrath slammed right into her like a vengeful angel with a singular purpose.