by DJ Molles
Batu pulled up short, and Perry slammed into him like a meteor. A crash. A tumble. Bones broken that immediately knit back together with the power of Confluence radiating through every cell in his body.
Perry was locked in with him now. Touching that beast for the first time, and there was no room left for fear of it, for awe at the size and strength of the spectacular being. Perry didn’t bother trying to fry him with energy—that was pointless at this juncture.
No, Perry was going to rip him apart.
Growling savagely, Perry speared an iron hand straight into the crack between the reticulated plates of Batu’s chest, and felt an infinite vindication at hearing a grunt of pain. He latched onto the plate and ripped at it, wanted to rip it free, wanted to expose the beating heart inside, if Batu even had one.
He didn’t get the chance.
A massive pulse, like an invisible wall, slammed into Perry, thrusting him back off of Batu, tumbling through the air. He felt his skull, his face, his chest, his ribs—all of them shattered and then healed in an instant.
Perry righted himself in the air, the clouds far below his feet, the curvature of the earth apparent now, the sun blazing hot on his skin—or perhaps that was the Confluence. He roared, tried to launch himself at Batu again, but Batu’s outstretched hands suddenly clenched, and the wall of energy now cinched around him tight, like the coils of a massive snake.
Perry was a fast learner. That was one of his best qualities in a fight. And even as the field of energy threatened to crush him, he brought his own hands together, projecting his own energy onto Batu, trying to crush him in return.
Green light pulsed out of Batu. Perry felt it buffeting against his invisible grip on Batu. Perry’s own vision turned black, and then green, and he realized his own skin was glowing, repulsing Batu’s attempts to crush him.
A stalemate, then.
That tiny background voice, like a gnat in Perry’s ear: Look at your arms…
Slavering like an animal in a trap, Perry glared down at his own limbs. Sections of his shirtsleeves had burned away to scorched tatters. The flesh beneath had cracked into sections. Gray skin that looked more like armor plating. Green light searing from between the cracks.
Look what they’ve done to you!
But it didn’t raise one speck of caution in him. Only made him angrier.
“Look around you!” Batu hissed, the two of them, rotating around each other in midair, as though they were tethered to some central pivoting point. “Look at this pathetic world, Perry!”
Perry.
Because no one ever used his real name unless they wanted something out of him.
“Look at all the people,” Batu raged on. “Weak and untrustworthy! Naggling, manipulative, self-righteous, self-pitying creatures! Do you know what they did to us, Perry? To me and my brothers? Now there’s a tale that’s never been told by all those lying tongues down below. Do you know what they did to us?”
“I don’t fucking care!” Perry strangled out, still fighting against the enormous crushing power, and trying to give it right back.
Batu ignored him. “They tried to use us. They saw us as weapons. All the little peons down below, they could never think of anything but how to kill each other. And they tried to use me and my brothers to do it. Tried to manipulate us into fighting for them, into killing their enemies, into being their tools of destruction! As though we were their slaves. As though they owned us.”
The coils that bound Perry suddenly moved, spun Perry around, seemed to grasp his head in ghostly, steel fingers, forcing his gaze down to the earth below. Down to the scorched wastelands. Down to the little blob of darkness in all that pale dust—Karapalida. A city crammed full of reckless, helpless, conniving, backbiting peons…
“They did to us the very same thing that they’ve done to you, Perry,” Batu said, his voice sounding closer, as though he were creeping up to Perry’s shoulder. And Perry found himself transfixed by the city below. Obsessed with it. With the vision that roiled through his head.
Of wiping it out. Of burning it off the face of the earth.
Look at what you’ve done to me! his thoughts railed at the creatures below that couldn’t hear him.
“They tried to make us fight, just like they tried to make you fight,” Batu went on, his presence so close, his breath like a hot gust against the back of Perry’s neck. “They tried to manipulate us. That’s all they ever do. They don’t understand their own weakness. They don’t understand that they can’t control everything. They don’t understand that some things are beyond their command. But we showed them. Oh, we showed them.”
And Perry saw it all. Like memories being piped directly into his head. Memories that were not his own, but felt like it anyways. Because he knew the pain, the rage, the madness, embedded into those memories…
A great swath of cities. Rich cities. Opulent people. Like the East Ruins, before it had been doomed. Weak people, made weaker by their own lusts, and infighting, and self-centered natures.
Wiped out.
The Nine, hovering high in the sky, burning it all to nothingness. Turning entire populations to ash. Turning entire cities to seas of glass.
“We destroyed the earth,” Batu whispered. “We incinerated the people. We turned the plains into the Wastelands, and the great works of humankind to the Glass Flats. We punished them. For their pride. For their petty natures. For trying to use us.” Closer. Hotter. Quiter. Intimate. Violent. “Just like they used you. Just like they convinced you that you had to come stop us to save them. They don’t care about what happens to you, Perry. They only care about their own pathetic lives, and they’ll use and destroy the very soul of anyone that they think might give them even one more day to keep killing, and fighting, and arguing, and breeding. Oh, Perry. Look at what they’ve done to you.”
And Perry felt himself turning towards Batu. But it wasn’t his own eyes that he was seeing with. He was seeing himself through Batu’s eyes.
Hair burned to the scalp. Features contorted with rage. Flesh turned to reticulated plates. Eyes without pupils, burning green. Burning with hatred. Burning with malice.
“You don’t have to let them use you,” Batu said.
The vision vanished. Perry was looking at Batu’s face with his own eyes now. But it wasn’t all that different, was it?
“You don’t have to be a pawn for the humans. You’re better than them. Stronger than them. You’re just like us now. And it’s their fault.”
Hard to see the truth. Hard to see any difference between friend and foe.
Everyone was an enemy to Perry. They all wanted him dead, or at the very least, had a hand in trying to kill him, overtly, or through their general apathy. Through their unwillingness to work together when he had fucking begged them to do so. Through the systems of oppression that they’d created and maintained and propogated, all the while crying that they were the victims, but they wouldn’t lift a finger to fight back. No, they left that to him. Because they didn’t care if he lived or died. They only cared about themselves.
But he couldn’t be killed. The Confluence wouldn’t let him die. He was stronger than them. What right did they have to live? After all that they’d done?
They all deserved what they got.
“Punish them!” Batu seethed.
The power bucked inside of Perry, as though trying to get out. Hard to control. He wanted to release it. He wanted to pour it out of him. He wanted to see that city down below turned to a sea of glass.
“Punish them!” Batu roared.
The field of energy gripping Perry released him.
He spun, feeling animated not by himself, but by the rotted form of Confluence now possessing him. The sliver of sanity recoiled, cried out in dismay. But Perry could let it die with the rest. It was only the vestiges of his human weakness. Just the sad, useless little part of him that had always allowed them to manipulate him.
He thrust his hands out, the city of Karapalida betwee
n those clawed fingers. A detonation of power inside of him. A shockwave of energy blasting out of the center of him.
Glass, was all he could think. Turn it all to glass!
Green light, pouring out of his fingertips, out of his palms, out of the cracks in his skin. Gathering in the center, hot and violent, starting to blot out the city below.
More! More!
He needed the release. He needed to loose it on them. He needed it.
A tiny speck, almost unseen through the building ball of death between his hands, streaking out of the west end of Karapalida.
Hesitation. A tiny throb of doubt, faltering the outpouring of energy, just long enough to let his eyes focus on that speck below, a wake of dust expanding behind it. The glimmer of sunlight across a streamlined metallic shape.
A skiff, he realized.
“Punish them!” Batu urged again. Something in that growling breath almost…desperate. As desperate as Perry’s own desire for destruction.
But the hesitation had built to a full stop. The weak human in him still held some remnant of sway over his actions. Forcing a spark of curiosity out of him that glowed brightly in the midst of all that dark, consuming power.
Perry’s eyes did a strange thing. He felt it, in the back of his sockets. Like a pressure. Rods and cones and lenses reforming in an instant, causing his vision to blur at the edges, but zoom into an incredible focus in the center, as though someone had held a telescope to his eyes.
A skiff. Filled with people.
Rotten, backstabbing, manipulative, self-serving—
Stuber’s face.
Somehow he saw it, dominating his vision as though he were standing right there with him. Stuber’s eyes were focused westward, squinted against the dust and wind, mouth flattened to a line. An expression that Perry had seen on him before.
The same expression he’d had when he’d watched the Guardians drop on Oksidado.
A deep, desperate concern.
For who?
For me?
The rage sputtered like a fire in a gale of wind. The ball of energy aimed at Karapalida flickered and shrank.
Teran. She was there too, just behind Stuber. Jagged worry all across her features. And Sagum beside her, and Whimsby beside him. And Mala and Lux, standing just behind. All of them huddled at the front of the skiff. All of them staring into the west. All of them looking stricken.
Stricken for what? Stricken for whom?
Why weren’t they running? Why weren’t they hiding? Why weren’t they using Perry to get away? Why were they charging out into danger, when Perry had expressly told them to flee while he held the Nine off?
Those stupid fucking peons! Perry raged, and he wasn’t sure whether that came from the corruption taking over his brain, or from that slice of humanity that was left. Why didn’t they listen to me?! Why aren’t they doing what I told them to do?!
“Punish them!” Batu screamed in his ear. A sound blast like a deep, basal tone issued from loudspeakers in Perry’s brain.
Perry flinched against that wave of sound—eardrums rupturing, then reforming again. His hands twitched. Clenched into fists. The ball of green light between them fizzling out like smoke.
“They’re looking for me,” Perry husked.
Then a wall of energy slammed into him again, sent him spinning on shattered bones and torn ligaments, flopping through the air for a second before everything healed itself again. Sky and earth rolled rapidly in his vision, and the dark shape of Batu amidst the white clouds—eyes seering hot, great plated teeth clenched in fury, one arm outstretched, green light coursing down it.
“NO!” Perry screamed, righting himself in the air.
Too late.
A blast of energy ripped through the clouds, streaked down towards the earth, and Perry could do nothing to stop it, could do nothing but jerk his head and see the terminal point of that blast.
Where there once had been a skiff, the wake of dust that marked its path still settling, there was only a smoking crater.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
TRUTH AND LIES
Perry hit the ground running. Sprinting. Numb all over. The pounding of his legs insensate. The world jumping in his vision. All of it distilled down to one point of focus: the black smoke pouring from a crater the size of a city block.
Debris all around. A hundred tiny meteorites made of bits and pieces of the skiff, scattered in a wide ring. Movement off to his right: Mala and Lux, staggering to their feet, flung a hundred yards from the center of the blast. Shields shimmering around them, but looking shell-shocked just the same. They stared at him as though they didn’t recognize him.
Focus back forward.
A glimmer of blue light in a pile of dust and twisted metal.
He skidded to a stop, staring down in horror, breath searing his throat as dry as the wastelands. He tried to speak but couldn’t. His throat was clamped shut with dust. With terror. With guilt. What had he done? What had he let happen?
Whimsby stared up at him, his body an unspeakable wreck. Just a torso, with its glowing blue core processor, an arm, and Whimsby’s head. The rest of him terminating in shredded wiring and twitching servos and rent steel.
Whimsby’s head came up, a frown crossing over his face—half of the flesh-like substrate ripped from it, so that just his expressive eyes stared up, so human-like, above a jaw avulsed to bare metal.
“Perry,” Whimsby said, his voice containing a weird, feedback-filled warble. “What happened to you?” But then, before Perry could even struggle through finding an answer, Whimsby’s one remaining arm jerked, fingers stripped to metallic bone pointing away. “The others...”
What did you do? The humanity shrieked inside of Perry.
He took off running again, stricken and split down the center of himself. Fearing for Whimsby. But knowing that Whimsby could be put back together again. Human flesh and bone was not so resilient.
What did you do?
Running. Eyes searching desperately through the wreckage for anything that looked like a person. His mind felt like it was shearing apart. Thoughts coming in jumbles of nonsensical chaos.
The ground shuddered beneath his pounding feet. He barely registered it, but knew in the back of his mind that Batu had come back to the earth. The Nine were behind him. And he knew that they were watching. He felt their attentions on him. Felt their hatred. And their sick satisfaction. They would be content to watch for a time. To watch Perry run himself ragged. To watch the effects of what they’d produced. Because they reveled in it. The misery and death. That’s all they were—beings of death.
There never had been a Giver of Strength, or a Giver of Wisdom. There had only ever been one Giver, and he had been the Giver of Confluence. The Giver of Death.
They had become Death themselves, and Death was all they craved.
What did you do?
An arm. Large. Muscular. Nothing attached to it. Skin blackened with char. Blood sprayed bright and shocking across the thirsty ground. Ground so dead that no amount of blood would ever bring it back to life.
“No,” the first word that Perry was able to eke out.
He bent. Grabbed the arm by the wrist. Specks of grit. Bits of burnt flesh. Still warm.
His own hand—gray plates where his skin used to be. No glow of green Confluence shimmering from the cracks anymore. It had all receded from him like a destructive tidal wave going back out to sea, leaving only wreckage in its wake.
He staggered on, still clutching the arm in his grip.
“Perry!” Mala’s voice, close by.
He didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. Knew she and Lux were chasing after him.
“Teran!” Perry shouted back, voice hoarse and cracking. “Sagum! Find them!”
But what could they possibly find but pieces?
A voice like thunder in the distance, chasing at his heels: “What have you done, little god? Have you killed all your little friends?”
But YOU kill
ed them! He thought, but didn’t have the breath or the gumption to say. What point was there in speaking with the deathly beings behind him? All they did was destroy, and tear apart, and lie.
Lies. They’re full of lies.
He registered Mala, out of the corner of his eye, stopping over a pile of something that had once been human. “Teran!” was all that Mala called out. Was she yelling at Teran’s body? Or was she yelling at Perry that she’d found Teran? Did it make a difference?
Death and lies.
Lux, on the other side of Perry, perhaps twenty yards off: “I found Sagum! Primus help me…”
“You’ve killed everyone you’ve ever cared about.” Was that Batu’s voice, or his own mind? Difficult to tell the difference. Just as difficult as it had been to tell friends from enemies, only moments ago. But that was just madness, wasn’t it? That was just the madness of lies and death, death and lies.
He did have friends.
He’d had friends.
Perry found him. Lying face down. Missing the very arm that Perry held in his grip. Face mushed into a pile of dust. Dirt turned to red mud where his arm had been. Torso blown open. Everything that was supposed to be inside of a man, now outside.
“Stuber.” His mouth made the words, but he couldn’t tell if he’d actually managed a sound. He couldn’t hear anymore. His senses had left him. Imploded on him. Gone inwards, so that all he knew was the feeling like his guts were being ripped out.
He thrust Stuber’s arm back where it belonged. Tried to roll the body, but his fingers lacked the sensation to grab. Just slid around. Grit, and sweat, and blood.
He felt nothing when his knees hit the ground. Close enough now to smell Stuber. Smell the burned flesh. The blood. The bowels. The ugliness of death, a thing he’d witnessed so many other times, but never like this.
He kept expecting Stuber to open his eyes, say something brave. Brag about how a missing arm was nothing to him. Say something about how he could just pack his guts back in where they belonged. Just scratches.
