Dark Iron King II: Arcadia Falls (Unreal Universe Book 5)
Page 84
The pain in that moment would be something that Garth knew he’d carry with him for the rest of his life. He supposed, strictly speaking, he should be pleased that something new had risen to replace the haunting memory of his time in the nanobox, though really, given a choice, something totally less … rapey … would’ve been totally awesome.
After that first hotshot had paralyzed him from head to toe … more tentacles. Many more. A relentless assault of crudey-crude bearing tentacles, slamming into him, burrowing remorselessly through his flesh, chewing and chewing and chewing deep into the muscle, blindly hunting for the quadronium core protecting him from full and complete conversion into whatever it was Barnabas dreamed of.
If he could shiver, Garth knew he’d start and never stop.
The King had wanted his due, hadn’t he just? After a month of traveling with the man who’d come to demolish his petty little kingdom, the man who’d done more with King’s Will and in such a short time, the man who’d proven he was the better man … well, Barnabas Blake was petty and spiteful and maddened with power, so he was the perfect example of a king after all, hey?
The man who’d done all that to the ruler of Arcade City needed to suffer, and in ways that’d become legendary.
The pain was a fluorescent thing, coursing through his … well, Garth called it his body, but really? It was hard to tell where the machinery he’d become started and where the Gunboy ended. In a very distant, unemotional way, the manner in which the strange clanking, whirring amalgamation of machine parts he’d become had merged so seamlessly with the Gunboy’s mech was quite amazing.
But amazement wasn’t enough. It never would be.
The pain was there, the pain was alive, the pain ebbed and flowed according to some mystical tide that sometimes rushed at him, leaving him breathless, staggering inside the confines of his own mind, wishing bitterly and eagerly for death or freedom or some other kind of escape, and then other times, it would recede to the furthest corners to gently fan deep, smoldering fires of blistering heat.
Neither were bearable, both were endurable.
When either instance of pain grew too great, and the King’s leering face loomed up out of the inky black darkness of his thoughts, Garth let the beast he called Specter out for a bit of a run. Possibly it was cowardly, especially since he knew that there was no such thing as ‘Specter’, that the cruel thing he called by that name was little more than the chimeric side of the Kin’kithal nature he so despised.
Regardless of who or what Specter truly was, the grinning face of the destructor willingly rode to the forefront of the mental battlefield whenever the King’s pressure grew too great to handle.
Rode forth, drank deep, displayed the genetically bred, extra-dimensionally enhanced viciousness that lurked in the very darkest corridors of his soul and sent both King and ‘sblood packing.
For a short while. Not long, but it was enough, yes it was, long enough to give Garth time to think. To consider that perhaps he’d been playing it wrong this whole time.
He wasn’t a man with the powers of a Kin’kithal. He was a Kin’kithal with the face of a man.
It was a hard concept to evoke, harder still to hold onto. And it was –Garth grew to believe- important.
Barnabas had screwed up, yes he had, and the King had realized that the moment his precious Gunboy, designed to be the perfect trap, manufactured to reveal all the secrets held within a nemesis he hadn’t even known existed, had transformed itself into a gigantic replica of the man himself. The King had long wanted Specter to rise up, to dominate the infinitely more easy-going Garth N’Chalez, erroneously believing that someone afflicted with the darkest things that Kingsblood pulled out of the psyche would be more easily controlled.
It was fair to say that both King and Outsider had been righteously shocked when neither had really happened, that Gunboy-transformed Kin’kithal was neither a raging gearhead howling at The Dome nor a dark smudge of evil incarnate sweeping across Arcade City.
Nor had the King considered the possibility that –at this level of saturation- all manner of things would be revealed about the true nature of Kingsblood, and of the rage that flexed through the minds of every man and woman poisoned by it!
Deep down in the Elixir, curled into the very nanotech DNA that inevitably transformed man into wardog into gearhead into Brigadier, there was the King Himself. King Barnabas Blake the One and Only had –in some fantastically fucked up way- merged himself with King’s Will, and thus, anyone taking that first sip, allowing that blowtorch to play across your soul, was to allow the King into your mind.
Possession through particulate.
What a concept!
Garth laughed, and were his head still connected to the giant body he’d just left behind, the whole of Arcade City would’ve rung with his hilarity.
King Barnabas Blake the One and Only, squatting in the dark, prying into the hearts and minds and souls of every man and woman who drank deep of Kingsblood, fanning the embers of the self-loathing, drinking deep of their secrets, amusing himself with the wretched torment they lived, forcing them to play out the pageantry of his pathetically black heart, day in and day out, a malicious voyeur of the worst sort.
Garth didn’t know why Barnabas would’ve done such a thing, couldn’t fathom the reasons behind willingly subjecting yourself to that level of insanity day in and day out –the Engineer could feel a few thousand pinpricks of volcanic heat in the back of his mind, and surely those were representative of the gearheads still alive ‘neath The Dome- but the one time the weird ability to see through to the heart of things could’ve come in handy, it’d failed and failed hard. The only thing all this torture had done to him was consider himself in a new light.
The Engineer laughed again, ears perking up when something shuddered noisily. Was he falling apart? Was his insane plan somehow working? He felt no pain yet –other than that caused by the ragged remnants pulsing through him- but that might very well change at any second.
The Engineer grinned. Thought he grinned. Imagined he grinned. Didn’t matter. The King made his gearheads run a gauntlet so they could be purified of their sins, freed from their own dark hearts. Had Barnabas Blake intended the same thing for him, forced to up the ante in terms of ‘sblood spilled?
If that had been his plan all along, well, the fucker was going to be seriously surprised. They all would be.
They thought he hated Specter. They were wrong. Garth loved Specter.
Embracing his Kin’kithal heritage was no more difficult than slipping into a pair of comfy shoes. Pulling away from that lifestyle when he’d dipped a little too frequently into Kith and Kin waters had been one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do. Since that time, at every corner, with every twist…
It was almost as if the Unreal Universe itself cried out for someone like Specter! It made no sense, especially since one of his most overriding concerns was that a maximum percentage of living beings survived until the very End.
If all you wanted was an empty Reality 2.0, Specter unfettered was your guy.
Unless … unless he could find a way to be both. Garth Nickels and The Specter.
Could it be done? Where was the line between not enough and too much?
A calamitous yowl of tortured metal being rive apart briefly tore Garth from his pointless reverie. Things were happening now. The teeth-juddering sounds reminded Garth that the savage appetite of a Kin’kithal was just as endless as the disintegration disc’s need for destruction. It couldn’t be tamed, couldn’t be whetted.
Hopefully when –if- he was separated from the Gunboy’s head, it’d be Nickels and not Specter that was reassembled from the metallic skin he currently inhabited.
A few motes, flickering like golden fireflies, twinkled here and there through across the broad spectrum of his vision, but before he knew it, he was full of worries about Reality 2.0 itself.
So much could go wrong. He could fail, he could win, but lose to
o many people. Whole galaxies could be sundered in the process. What then? A half-formed new Universe with barely enough life to get it going?
No! The people of the Unreal Universe deserved more than they’d been given!
Reality 2.0. The completion of a dream had by an Engine that may or may not exist. It –and the people who would one day soon populate that never-ending, eternal sheath of leaves- deserved a better introduction into Reality than being born hot on the heels of bloody violence and deadly intent.
Garth was no fool. The End, when it came, was going to be bloody and violent. There was no denying that, there was no getting away from it. His father, Kith Antal, had an infinite army at his disposal. There was no guessing how advanced the machines to create Harmony soldiers had become across thirty thousand years, but Garth was going to go ahead and assume that they were a far cry away from those Antal had left for the people of Latelyspace to discover.
No, the War was going to be the epitome of conflict. If he could play it right, though, the only things dying that hour, that day, that week, that year … the only things dying would be those things that he didn’t want in Reality 2.0.
Harmony? Not allowed.
God soldiers? Forget it.
Kith, Kin? Never. Not in a million years.
Kin’kithal Garth N’Chalez? Not fucking likely.
This close to the end, there was a whole list of entities, concepts and monsters that Garth planned on destroying well before things came to a close. The souls of the men and women and children and other that would be ushered in through the hole created by that war would pass into the space that Universe 2.0 would fill unfettered, unburdened, untainted by the monstrosities that the Unreal Universe had spawned.
If they were very, very lucky, if all went according to plan, the citizens of Universe 2.0 would know nothing of what’d been before. Everything that’d come before that new universe would be nothing more than myth and legend, song and story.
And that was just how it should be.
The golden fireflies were flying fast and furious now, the giant head he was trapped in breaking down into component parts ushering to feed the King’s hungry maw. If he could shrug, Garth would’ve: who knew the King would do something painl…
“Ouch.” Something ripped loose from his body. Black fluid sprayed in the air, quickly transforming into glittering specks as the field did it’s job. “Ouch. Ouchouchouchouchouch.”
In panicked response to his possible demies, the huge, strange machine Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez had become, a living engine, indestructible flesh transformed into hard-edged Dark Iron clockwork, was, for lack of a better concept, solving itself like the mother of all Rubik’s Cubes.
And it hurt.
Like a motherfucker.
Golden fireflies and black dots converged to throw one poor Engineer hurtling into darkness.
***
Boom!
“Bollocks.”
Boom! Crash!
“Bloody fuckin’ ‘ell.”
A high-pitched sound of machinery warning everyone in the near vicinity that it’d had enough of being pounded on and was getting ready to explode or do something else equally violent filled the air, a shrill wail that brought the unconscious man awake with a half-stifled shout about Nutella.
Head still ringing, wonderfully impressed by the fact that he hadn’t died as the head had shivered into nothingness, Garth took stock of the situation.
Someone was ‘helping’ him by hammering away at the cylinder’s guts, which was nice. Garth made to turn and drop a witty comment to his would-be assistant when he noticed something important.
He was no longer Garth Nickels, the Machine-Bodied Boy!
Garth looked suspiciously at his arms and fingers while the unknown man off to one side continued trying to make some kind of dent in the King’s engine. There were no signs at all that he’d spent the last week as nothing more than a giant collection of machine parts.
Fucking nanotech.
Not that Dark Iron had given up. Not by a longshot. His insides felt scoured clean, top to bottom and all the way through. About the only good thing –and here, ‘good’ was definitely all the way off in left field- was that he knew there was a tiny bit of that old Kin’kithal magic inside working diligently to keep him safe. Safe-ish. Less dead.
“Bet that spark is all burned out, though.” Garth said softly, feeling out of sorts when the words didn’t boom out across the open fields.
A week.
That was all it took to get used to something balls-to-the-wall insane.
Fucking weird.
“I am forgetting something.” He was always forgetting stuff these days. It was super hard to keep mental track of everything when everyone in your life was either trying to kill you and wear your body as a skinsuit or change you into, oh, like, a giant fucking robot. “What is it…”
Slam! Noises sounding an awful lot like a big bag of broken glass filled the air, followed by an actual, warbling, wavering siren.
“Shit.” Garth hung his head. The reclamation cylinder! Someone –or something- was trying to fuck it up for him, because he’d apparently been too damn busy being unconscious to finish the job.
How in the goddamn hell did you forget something like that?
It was the King’s fault. The King was to blame for every-fucking-thing.
Before confronting the maniac who apparently possessed both the strength to fuck up a King-forged machine and a staggering lack of self-preservation, the Engineer took one last look at his freshly minted body. It was awesome.
“No more fucking Rubik’s Cubes now, y’hear?” He shouted loudly.
Arms and legs and hands and feet and fingers and toes did nothing, which was a thing Garth earnestly prayed became the status quo from now until the end of time.
Then, because the siren was growing louder and the frustration in his cylinder-buddy grew more and more vocal with each passing failure, he took a good long look at the idiot brave enough to attempt to rescue the biggest idiot of them all.
“Huh.” Garth pursed his lips. “When I woke up this morning as a giant metal robot with an Obsidian Golem perched on my shoulder like a particularly unconvincing pixie, the last thing I ever imagined was that, at the end of the day, after successfully contriving a method of removing myself from the robot, I would find myself face to, uh, face with what can only be described as Medieval Terminator 1000.” Garth held up a hand and pretended he didn’t wait for a finger or two to turn into clockwork skeleton keys. “And no, before you ask, I got no clue where John Connor is.”
“Who the hell is John Connor?” The platinum-clad Brigadier demanded, brandishing a handful of junk that –even as he considered flinging it at Garth- flared into golden specks, a feat that simply replenished the damage done to the cylinder all over again.
“Well they say he’s the savior of Mankind and that he destroys Skynet. Only I think he’s a fucking … wow. Just, uh. Yeah. So, there’s that.” Garth moseyed on over to where the T-1000 stood, making doubly damn sure that his footing was rock solid. Beyond the extremely awkward angle the machine was now set, it was also about as safe to walk on as a rickety hand-made fence above the mouth to hell was; directly beneath their feet, a whirling maw of white-hot teeth spun fast as a centrifuge, swallowing every last scrap of matter being transformed into those sparkly, floaty bits of light, and with the tiny, persistent tremors rocking the whole rig, it’d be too damn easy to fall in.
“Indeed.” The T-1000 replied drolly. “The very mouth of hell.”
Garth crouched down to look at the junction box his buddy the Medieval T-1000 stood above, taking a surreptitious look in the man’s shiny greaves. Haggard, drawn, weary as fuck, but one eye was still blue and the other eye looked kinda-sorta like his own eye, except … black. Not the hard, solid black of Dark Iron, or the steamhorse eye, just, like … black.
“Did you just use my armor as a mirror?” The Brigadier demanded huffily.
“Perhaps,” the T-1000 suggested archly, “you missed the reality that quite a few people in this … shitburg … City are uncomfortable with how they look? Now, look you, enough of this! I seem to have done something to the mechanics of this blasted thing. Look yon.”
Garth followed the finger. Then, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, he sighed miserably. Trees more than two hundred feet past the edge of where the reclamation cylinder’s disintegration disc had stopped quivered into incandescent golden light, which was then hastily shuffled on down the length of the invisible field. The maw sucked down the effervescent lightshow and the teeth spun faster.
“Sooooo,” Garth chewed at a lip, “the goal was? Fuck the shit out of this thing and hope it stops?”
“I have it on authority that this was your plan as well.” The T-1000 countered haughtily.
“Yes, well.” Garth flipped open the very same junction box his pal the stupid knight in actual, literal shining armor had been hammering away at, shaking his head. “I say stuff like that because no one in this fucking city… actually, no one I know at all wants to hear the long version of anything I do. I start, and halfway through, all you fuckers are, like, dancing from foot to foot. By the time I start explaining the science behind something, everyone has wandered off to have a fucking nap or whatever and it’s all I can do not to head-butt you so hard your hair falls out.”
A metallic, partially liquefied-sounding gasp of exasperation escaped the knight in shining armor’s fully encased head. “So that was not the plan, then?”
“I just realized.” Garth shifted a bit so personal parts of himself weren’t in immediate view. “I am totally naked. And I don’t have my smithy tools. You. Medieval T-1000 who has no clue what nanotechnology is, can you, like, make shit that’s not attached to you?”