“Father,” Banksy rumbled.
“You’re all grown up, kiddo,” I called up to him. “You don’t need me anymore.”
“I will always need you,” Banksy said. “Just because I’m bigger doesn’t mean you’re no longer my father.” He looked up for a moment then back to me. He still didn’t have eyes, but I somehow felt his piercing gaze. “You don’t have to do this. You can stay here, with me. I can protect you now.”
I felt the tears start to stream down my face. I’d cried a lot since I’d come here. I’m not ashamed to admit it. But it had stopped, for a while. I reached, and Banksy lowered his head further, straining to get it low enough to touch me. We held that way for a moment before he drew back.
“I would if I could,” I said. “But I’m leaving, one way or the other.”
Banksy nodded.
“I’m not real, am I, father?”
I was taken aback by the question.
We’re using the new quantum stacks for the server, Anatoly had said. Expensive, but their processing power is… it’s unbelievable. The AIs are getting better and better. It will change everything.
“This world is fake,” I said. “But you are real, I promise you that. You are just as real as I am.”
“When you’re gone, what’s going to happen to me?”
Jesus. “I don’t know,” I said. “But if it helps, some of us struggle with that same question out in the real world.”
“Maybe I’ll go to the same place.” He sounded hopeful, wistful. “Maybe there will be stars.”
I nodded. “Maybe. I hope so.”
“Okay then, father,” Banksy said. “Go. Cast your spell, and I will protect you. Say hi to Ruth for me. Say hello to my sister.”
“I will,” I said. “I promise.”
“Goodbye, father. I love you. And if I do go to that place, I promise I will find your Chris, and I will tell him you said hello.”
Chapter 77
Thankfully, Gusion, the poop-throwing baboon managed to figure out how to kill Tem with minimal effort. I knew of the two kaiju I had demons planted within, Tem would be the harder to kill, so I had him go first.
A few minutes earlier, I had placed myself at the very tip of the T. At the space where the blinding statue of the creator once sat. At the place where the now-shattered statue of Paskunji had stood for a thousand years.
I’d felt it, the moment I stood over the correct spot. It was as if I had stepped upon a nail made of celestial power. It was an invisible thread, shooting straight into the air. I could pass my hand over it. Pain lanced through me, though I took no damage.
I swallowed hard as I opened up my spell menu. I had never told Banksy about Chris. How had he known? Clara must have told him.
But then, I no longer had time to think about it.
The moment Tem fell, my soul power bar surged to the very top, glowing yellow. Explosions ripped behind me. A new, final battle raged. But it was not for me.
I cast Rend Dimension.
The spell took twenty minutes to cast, and it required a constant, unending source of soul power. That was easy in hell where soul power permeated the very world, but here, I’d had to improvise.
I received my soul power bonus for just about ten minutes after the death of a kaiju. There was a residual trickle for the remaining ten minutes before the guardian blinked away and went to their respawn. But for this spell, I needed a constant, uninterrupted supply. So in order for this to work, I needed two guardians to die at a precise interval.
I rose into the air as the soul power leeched into me and then out again. I was cocooned in magic as that painful thread of celestial power pierced me. I was but a capacitor. I could not move. I could barely see. I was aware of the fighting around me, above me.
My health did not move, but that single, infinitely-thin thread of celestial power was the single most painful thing I had ever felt. I hadn’t realized it would be like this. I screamed, but no sound came.
This is too much. This is too much.
It is never too much.
If I’d learned anything in my time in this godforsaken place, it was one thing: to take pain.
It was all conditioning for this, I realized. Training, grinding. All preparation for the moment I would cast this spell.
Worm surgeons, radiants, sundered, and others had somehow gotten through Banksy’s protective circle. Then I realized Banksy wasn’t even there anymore. Several bolts crashed against my side, but I was protected, somewhat. With each hit, I could feel the spell falter. Enough hits, and it would fail.
Keep me safe, I cried wordlessly through the pain. Keep me safe.
Tem’s death waned. But then, right on time, Bast fell, and my soul power raged anew.
A whirlwind of fire spun around me. I caught nothing but glimpses. Banksy and Baal fought side-by-side, grappling with a new threat.
Paskunji. Of course, Paskunji. She was in her angel form, but she burned like the phoenix. She’d transformed. Her body was made of lava. She fought with a sword of molten chains, and she whipped it at me while Baal and Banksy blocked.
Baal alone would never have been able to hold her back. Clara flew by, firing her gun. Guildmaster Fiona was there, as was Renault. They fought the radiants. They died. They died protecting me.
Baal smashed Paskunji with his meteor, and the very world shifted. But I did not move. I was pierced by the pinprick within reality, held in agonizing place.
Banksy wrapped himself around the flaming angel, and he squeezed. Paskunji fell onto her side. She screamed, fire and lava flowing from every orifice in her body, washing over Medina, crashing toward me.
Banksy crashed to the ground, releasing the angel and throwing his body between me and the waves of lava. A moment later, Banksy was gone. I felt his soul power pouring into me.
Behind his body, Paskunji ceased to flail, and she died yet again. Baal fell right beside her, three terrible rents down his chest. First to his knees, then to the ground. He also crashed to the earth.
That’s not the plan, I tried to call. Don’t you fucking die, Baal. Not after all I have done.
Then it was just Clara, by herself, floating before me, screaming. She’d lost her gun in the fray, but she had that enormous soul mace she’d pulled off the dead demon. She swung it back and forth as the radiants and sundered advanced. The onslaught poured into me, and my spell faltered and sputtered as Clara died.
But then, the spell was done.
A hole opened in the world directly below me, yawning like a mouth. A small hole, but it was big enough.
I activated my shield as the spell released me, and I fell right through the hole in the second before it snapped closed.
Chapter 78
Entering Heaven
Warning: You do not have access to soul power within this realm.
I emerged onto a solid, white plane. There was nothing here, no features at all. It was as if the game designers had decided to eventually make this a place, but they never got around to it.
Uh-oh, I thought as my soul power bar drained away on its own.
A light emerged. Whether a tiny light growing in size or coming toward me from a distance, I could not tell. A voice spoke, and the white, round light pulsed with each word. A woman, surprisingly. She sounded oddly like Mary, my wife.
“Duke,” she said. “You almost did it. You almost won. You got into heaven. But the gate is now closed. Everyone who was helping you is dead. The game won’t end until it is won, and winning will be difficult for you since you are stuck here.”
“Why aren’t there any features?” I asked, looking around. “There should at least be white, fluffy clouds or something. Fat, naked babies with harps, that sort of thing.”
My view changed, and a field emerged, growing from the ground. Cotton grew, bloomed all around me. The field didn’t end.
“That’s not exactly what I meant,” I said. “But it’ll do, I guess.”
The light didn’t answer.
It hovered near me, expectantly.
I sat, falling down in the field. God, I was exhausted. And not just my body. I brushed my finger across the cotton. It didn’t feel quite right. A cool breeze whipped across my shoulders.
“You’re not the real god,” I said finally.
“How do you know?” the voice asked. Her voice was more curious than accusing.
“Well, first off, this is a fucking video game. But if it wasn’t, I would know you’re not the real god because he or she or whatever doesn’t exist. And you know what? That really sucks. I want to believe in you. That’s something people don’t understand when it comes to people like me. By god, I want to believe in you. I want it so bad. No pun intended. But even then, even if you were real, and I knew it, and I was here right now before you, I would look directly at you and say, ‘Fuck you, god. Fuck you for putting me in this situation. Fuck you for making me do everything I’ve had to do to get here. Fuck you for throwing my daughter down that path. Fuck you for creating this world, just so people can suffer while others look on and laugh. Fuck you for allowing my child to die. That’s what I would say.’”
The light pulsed. It did not answer. I had the feeling it was still processing.
“Besides,” I added. “You’re obviously not omniscient.”
“Why do you say that?”
Sometime in the past hour, my ability to cast Invulnerable returned. My ability to use that spell came from my armor, not my soul points, so I was fairly certain I could cast it if I wanted. I toyed with the idea as I watched the countdown timer plummet toward zero.
But in the end, I decided against it.
I stood and brushed myself off.
“If you were omniscient, then you would know what I chose as Banksy’s permanent respawn point.”
I grinned at the game AI in the second before I exploded.
***
Two minutes and twenty seconds never felt so good.
***
I never got to see the gate blast open, nor did I see the remaining demons rush the new rift and pour into the heavens. I don’t know if my fellow worm surgeons and other humans joined them, but I hoped so. I hoped whatever they found was everything they wanted in an afterlife.
After all, that’s what I found.
I didn’t respawn in my home base, nor did I respawn in Bast, nor the cockpit of the Shrill. In those last seconds I’d made a decision and changed it one last time, in the off chance I still had time to right one of the many wrongs of this world.
Entering Oblation Chamber.
I popped back into the room filled with screaming children just as the credits started to crawl across the screen. Music played. Low, haunting orchestral music, the kind that usually played at the end of a sad movie.
All my status bars and menus were gone. But I could still move. I still had my gun. I still had my knife. The words floated in front of me, crawling up the screen, half obscuring everything.
A game like this, the credits would probably take a long time to finish. Twenty minutes at least.
Long enough for me to kill every damn heartworm in this chamber. I pulled my knife, and I went to work.
Just as I eased a gasping and wide-eyed Gulch to the ground of the now-silent oblation chamber, Jenk wandered in.
He sat down, sitting right on a pile of dead worms. He observed all the dead and dying children, an eyebrow raised.
“So, you’ve done the impossible. You won the game by leading Baal out of hell, something, mind you, that has never been done before. You survived the fabled Shoggoth casting while under direct control. You discovered a new form of Paskunji. You somehow figured out how to blast open the gates of heaven. And you celebrate this incredible victory by somehow also becoming the first player to figure out how to kill children?”
I looked about the room. Each child I freed gasped a few times, looked at me long enough for their minds to register they were free, and they died. I had no idea why the game allowed them to perish now, as the endless credits rolled, but I was grateful for it. It was a mercy, something rare in this place. And while I could no longer collect soul points, I felt their weak souls slide away.
I grasped Gulch’s hand. His eyes fluttered.
“She didn’t lie to you,” I whispered. “I was the one who was wrong. It is going to be okay.”
A long, raspy breath escaped the boy’s throat as he died.
“You never cease to amaze,” Jenk said, looking between the boy and me, eyes registering an amused shock. “This is quite heartwarming. It’s like a Hallmark movie of the week.”
I sighed, finally looking at the man. I sat down across from him on the bloody floor.
“Soliloquy time?” I asked.
He laughed.
“All right,” I said. “So what’s it gonna be? Is this where you tell me I’m not going to really wake up? Or my rig is buried under 10 feet of concrete? Or am I already long dead, and I’ve been an AI the whole time? I just thought of that one a few days ago.”
“No,” Jenk said. “Like I said before, I don’t lie. I want you to live. I want you to tell the world everything that went on out here. A couple minutes ago when I saw that you had won, I made a phone call. The Seattle police received a tip about a secret room hidden behind a wall in a building in Capital Hill.”
“I’m still in Seattle? Are you sure? You said you didn’t know where I was.”
“I suspected, but I wasn’t certain. But then I pulled up the power usage for the building, and now I’m pretty sure my hunch is correct. Your rigs and the servers don’t take up as much juice as you might think, but nobody is supposed to be living there.”
“So the police are coming right now?”
“Yes. In fact, they’re already there, trying to break the wall down. I wouldn’t have done it if you hadn’t won, in case you’re wondering. I wouldn’t want you to think all that work was for nothing. Our window will be tight. They’ve been on high alert for a couple weeks, and they’re in an absolute frenzy. It’s nail-biting stuff. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to watch the news in the last few days, but someone,” he paused dramatically, so I knew exactly who that someone was, “tipped off the press as to why the authorities are in such a lather. When you and Clara began running low on food, the system started spamming warnings about your sustenance levels. I allowed a single message to get forwarded to one of the many email addresses the FBI is monitoring. They’ve been running around like chickens the whole time trying to figure out where you and Clara are. CNN was running a countdown timer on the corner of their screen. Just last night they had a whole panel of doctors talking about how long someone could stay alive in one of those rigs without food.”
“But why? Why are you doing all this?”
He shrugged. “Some of us like to solve jigsaw puzzles. Some like to take machines apart and see if we can put them back together. When I was a kid, I would spend months setting up elaborate rows of dominoes, just to watch them all fall down. It’s my thing. It’s all part of my plan. And this part will be pretty exciting, let me tell you. One last quest for the indestructible Duke.”
“Yeah, and what is that?” I said.
“The credits are going to run dry in about five minutes. According to the police scanner, the cops will breach the chamber in less than 15 minutes. I timed it pretty well if I say so myself. So you’ll only have a couple minutes to kill Clara.”
“I’m not going to kill Clara,” I said.
“Okay, I guess I did lie to you once. Way back when we first met, I said, ‘I have no interest in you.’ That was a bit of a fib. And I apologize. I pride myself in being as truthful as possible. It’s a sign of respect, you know. When Clara first said she wanted you in here as her payment, I made a point of finding out why. How do you two intersect? She wouldn’t say. But when I finally figured it out, oh boy. An opportunity like this doesn’t come along often for a guy like me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Like
I said, Duke. This is my thing. The Duke who first came into this game would never kill her. He had some inhibitions that first needed to be whittled down. The Duke who is about to wake up is a different animal. By the way, her real name is Samantha Dillon. Clara was the name of the doll she had as a child.”
“Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”
He shrugged, a stupid smile on his face.
“Bye, Duke,” he said as the last of the credits rolled. “I can’t wait to read about you in the papers.”
“Bye, Jenk,” I replied. “Oh, and by the way.”
I shot forward with my grappling hook. I grasped him by the face and pulled him to me. He struggled in surprise as I used my right hand to pull the amplification knife across his throat.
I was greeted with a crimson spray. I leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “I’ll be coming to visit you and Nadia and Melinda and little Peyton in Toronto soon enough.”
I was rewarded with a look of horrified recognition on his face.
Thank you for playing Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. We hope you had a great time!
Chapter 79
Jenk was right. We had never been moved. I don’t know if Clara had been wrong about the warehouse thing, if she’d been lying, or what. But when I woke up in the Honda Labs penal rig, I was less than 15 feet from the spot I’d been when I first was captured.
My body felt simultaneously rigid and made of jelly. Multiple needles remained stuck in me.
Everything felt dull. My body was weak. Colors were muted. The pain, while probably incredible, was nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Anatoly had said the penal rigs had a system to keep muscles from atrophying. But when I sat up in that rig, I didn’t believe him. I had a tube down my throat, and I grasped it. My arms were shorter than usual, weaker. My hair longer, my fingernails obscene. I pulled on the tube, pulling it up and up and out. It scraped. My bone dry mouth filled with blood.
Outside, I could hear hammering. I pulled needles from my arm. The neural cradle was still on my head. I ripped it off. I snapped it in half.
Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon Page 59
