by Skyler Grant
“If Veros set off nuclear bombs there may be residual radiation at a dangerous level, if we appear where one detonated. Otherwise I’m not sure exactly what we’re going to find. I was the voice of rebellion, I don’t know exactly what the others did to keep things moving,” Yve said.
Lea said, “With all the fights we’ve been getting into and the boss no longer being around, I’ve installed some magical shielding. It should safeguard us from radiation as long as you stay on board.”
It sounded like we were as ready, as much as we were ever going to be.
“Take us in.”
The air around the Vainglory took on a rainbow shimmer and in an instant we were elsewhere.
Ripples of energy filled the air over the ship, wrapping it in a bubble of green magical energy—the shields activating. Below us were the ruins of a city. The few buildings that remained were blackened husks. Nothing moved in the streets.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“City Seven. Three million people, the last I knew. Gob called this place home,” Yve said, and then asked, “Mela, are you here?”
There was no response.
“Take us out of the radiation. Heading two hundred and eight degrees,” Yve said.
Lea gave her the sort of look that spoke volumes about which of them was actually the Captain of this ship. Despite this, the Vainglory did begin to move and soon we were leaving the city behind.
After several minutes of flight, the shields faded. Vegetation grew below.
Gray gnats swarmed across the deck and formed a thick cloud. Out of it stepped Mela looking surprisingly flesh and blood.
“Neat trick,” Yve said.
“I’ve gotten good with nanites. I mean they’re small, but they can do such amazingly terrible things. Earthlings are just about the best people ever for inventing them,” Mela said.
I’m glad someone was happy at the technological prowess of the old world.
“Are all of the cities like that one?” Yve asked.
Mela shook her head. “Two, Seven, Nine, Eleven, Fourteen and Fifteen were nuked, but the others are still standing. They’re in trouble, with all automated services shut down because the links to the others are gone.”
Yve rubbed at her eyes. “So he struck all of their major data hubs. The redundant arrays?”
“I’m not sure why, but they failed. I’ve got some friends of yours coming, don’t kill them,” Mela said.
A flying aircar approached the Vainglory and landed on the deck. Doors hissed open and out came some figures I was very happy to see. My brother Tommy first among them. I hugged him and he did that stiff and awkward thing he always did.
Maria and Leosi stepped out right after him.
Good, I’d been a bit worried about them. Well, I was worried about Maria. Fuck Leosi, he was a dick and lucky to be alive anyways after I’d killed him once.
“You can let me go now,” Tommy said.
I released him with a grin that wouldn’t stop.
“I was worried about you. All of you,” I said.
“Do you have any idea what caused this catastrophe?” Maria asked.
“We killed Veros, who was originally one of the other artificial intelligences. I guess he had things rigged to explode in the event of his death,” I said.
“Idiot,” Maria said.
Ashley laughed, a sound both strangely delighted and uncomfortable all at once.
“You okay?” I asked.
“It really was us. I knew it—I think I’ve known for a week. Ever since we killed Veros I’ve been happy. I’d kind of forgotten what it felt like,” Ashley said.
“Because you got your vengeance,” I said.
Ashley shook her head. “I thought that at first, but somehow I knew it’s something more. It’s the dagger, you know the one I used to kill him?”
I felt a sinking sensation in the pit of my stomach. Diamond had warned us about that dagger, although even she didn’t know why.
“Yeah?” I asked.
“I think it somehow… feeds on the souls of those it kills. Gobbles them up and tears them apart and feeds me all the delicious little pieces. I thought I was just high on Veros being dead, but it always seemed too much. I killed millions of people,” Ashley said, followed by another of those disconcerting little giggles.
Great. The friend I’d been hoping was no longer a sociopath was high off having accidentally killed millions of people.
I hadn’t come to terms yet with the fact that we were involved. A part of me felt like I should have been overwhelmed with grief or regret—or something. I wasn’t. It wasn’t that I felt nothing, I did, but mostly I felt that Veros was an asshole and I was glad we’d killed him.
Maria was leaning in to study Ashley’s features. “It is nice to see her happy.”
Leosi said, “You fought an enemy like that and did not first consider the consequences? Boy, you have much to learn about being a King.”
Ashley told him, “Liam just got married to your Ex. Not the one he got pregnant, the other one.”
To be fair I’d gotten both of them pregnant. Sort of. Did Elsora even need the stolen genetic material to knock herself up, if she was in fact Ashera? I didn’t know. It likely meant something in all of that was another lie—and I was forgiving her the lies. Damn it. Probably best not to bring up the child that may or may not exist. Elsora wasn’t showing yet, if she was pregnant, and so far we weren’t advertising the fact.
“Why? Alera, I could at least understand,” Leosi asked, honestly mystified.
Alera was the name Cobalt had gone by when she was married to him. He’d loved her a great deal, and I think she had loved him as well.
“Incredibly poor judgment makes itself clear in many ways,” Maria said in her monotone. When it came to cutting words she really was a talent.
Yve said, “They love each other. It isn’t that perplexing, is it? Can we please shift the subject of conversation back to the dying planet?”
Tommy said, “Congratulations, brother. And thank you. Before the AIs came along, humanity had done a lot of damage to Earth’s ecosystems.”
“You’d kind of trashed the place. It has had a lot of time to recover though,” Yve said.
“Perhaps, if it had been left alone, but the others were aggressively terraforming to make the planet more habitable and even to bring back extinct species,” Tommy said.
It suddenly made a lot of sense why Gob knew how to make a dinosaur.
“So things aren’t in equilibrium or anything close,” Yve said.
“We think a lot of those processes are still running and throwing the environment more and more out of alignment,” Tommy said.
We had an idea of what was happening now. Good, but that wasn’t a solution.
“Options,” I said.
“Selaris,” Yve said.
“No—to the hell, no,” Mela said.
Selaris, a Nature Goddess, we’d corrupted her tree. Mela had kind of killed and ate her kid, so Selaris had a bit of a grudge.
“You think she could help?” I asked.
Yve said, “Mela’s adroitness with machinery served her well even here. I imagine she is having trouble with environmental controls, because they are so outside her area of expertise. Selaris might instinctively be able to put things right.”
It was a good thought. Mela had also been fair to us. Without a doubt, she was incredibly dangerous and completely amoral, but she was still a friend.
“She’ll also try to kill Mela. We don’t want that. Anything else?” I asked.
Mela offered, “I can kill everyone left alive. With the nanites, I mean. I already figured out how to do it with a nanite plague. I could make copies of them first and transfer them to the Crucible Shard.”
Mela wanted to murder the rest of Earth’s population as a solution.
“We could have then transitioned over to DLC. White could phase them in slowly, get them leveled up. We might be doing them a favor,” I
said.
Mela looked cheerful. Maybe she hadn’t expected anyone to go for the planetary genocide idea.
“I hate to say it, but there is Gob,” Yve said.
“All of the artificial intelligences are dead,” Tommy said.
“I wished Gob mortal,” Ashley said.
“Exactly. I don’t know if it worked for him quite like it worked for me, but if so then Gob’s brain is still alive and functional, living in a meat copy on the Crucible Shard,” Yve said.
Ashley said, “We’re talking about the little guy that kept trying to kill us and vivisected a lot of people, and made terrifying monsters out of them? You want to put him back in as the sole program in charge of Earth? I mean, I’m on a mass murder high and even I think that sounds like a bad idea.”
“I can keep an eye on him,” Mela said.
We all stared at her.
“I’ve busted my ass trying to save all these people. That counts for something,” Mela said defensively.
“Mela’s assistance has been invaluable. Without her many more would have died,” Maria said.
That was true. Besides which, she was working against her own plan with the offer.
Deciding, I told them, “We try to get Gob and see if he can fix things. If not, we go with the nanoplague.”
Chapter 3
Finding Gob was easier than we expected. The last anyone saw of him had been when we invaded the spire of Liara’s castle. The fight had wound up with a bullet put through his head. It had been a pretty convincing show of loyalty at the time, but mortality on the Crucible Shard wasn’t exactly static. Because Gob died, he’d respawn, and that meant he’d pop back into existence either close to where he’d been killed or at his home base. It just so happened that they were one and the same.
The Vainglory materialized over the fields of glass that had once been the Alkari desert. Sections of starship still adorned the towers of black and white that served as Liara’s home.
We signaled as we drew close and powerful wards faded to allow us through. The towers showed signs of recent construction. Liara was nearly as efficient as Elsora, a fact not surprising in the least. There was even a basic airship dock. She was there to greet us.
“Liam, to what do I owe the pleasure?” Liara asked, leaving off my title. She pulled me into a hug as I stepped from the ship. To a casual observer it might have seemed that she brushed a kiss against my lips, a keener eye would see the faint sheen of blood her sharp nip left behind.
Liara was a rare figure on the Crucible Shard. An end boss who had wiped out pretty much every evil that had come along for millennia, she was immensely powerful. There weren’t many locals I felt the need to be cautious around, but she was one of them.
We left Riggs and Lea behind on the ship along with Tommy—Riggs and Lea in case we needed a quick exit, and Tommy simply wasn’t in a league with the rest of us.
Everyone else came, I wanted as much muscle with me as possible. I didn’t think Liara would pick a fight, but it was difficult to tell. I’d had a fling with her alter ego that came out in the daylight. I’d liked that part of her. With the world now plunged into eternal darkness I was stuck with the other half who I was quite certain would rather skin me alive than sleep with me.
“I’m looking for Gob. Short, brilliant, insane. I think you may have him,” I said.
Liara guided us inside and a few others stepped in to join us. I recognized a few. Emelia the Bloodwitch, Silas the Piercing Wail, both greater evils and quite powerful in their own right. Liara had brought her own muscle and wanted us to know it.
The walls inside were solid black, although speckled more liberally than one would expect with the brown flecks of dried blood. I didn’t want to think about what Liara’s usual method of entertaining must entail.
“I have him. He commanded forces that invaded my home and killed my people. We’ve been having a delightful time exploring the many ways in which this was a terrible idea. Would you care for something to drink? Wine? Tea?” Liara asked.
How casually she went between torture and tea. I admired the aplomb, but was suddenly grateful I had the particular evil Queen that I did.
“Wine, thank you. I want him. I’m certain we can work out some arrangement,” I said.
Liara snapped her fingers and servants appeared with glasses of wine on a tray. I took a sip of one, it was exquisite. I couldn’t fault her hospitality so far.
“You may try to sway me. Do you have some grisly torture of your own design that you wish to inflict?” Liara asked.
I didn’t think that I should say my actual goal was to put him in charge of a planet.
“You know the things of which he was a part. Did you discover what he had done to those people of Earth that were here?” I asked.
Liara gave a tiny smile as she settled back on a chaise, nursing her glass. “The man is something of a poet with flesh, isn’t he? Poor judgment with abysmal taste in enemies, but then the art should be judged apart from the artist.”
Liara had the hots for Gob, or perhaps felt some sort of perverse aesthetic attraction. Whatever it was, it wasn’t something that I wanted to dwell on.
“We’ve worked well together in the past. What do you want?” I asked.
“Nothing. You can’t have him. While I’d love to flirt and wheedle a few hours from you or your friends in my dungeons, I’m fond of that new wife of yours and Gob’s crimes are not something I can let pass,” Liara said.
I wanted to say there was no way we’d agree to spending a few hours being tortured, but I knew better. Yve had made such a deal before. We all did what needed doing however unpleasant the price.
“Not even for old time’s sake?” I asked.
Liara’s gaze was steady and her expression gave nothing as she shook her head. I didn’t like where this was going. I was going to have to claim rank here.
“I am the King of the Twelfth Moon. I insist,” I said.
“I’ve sworn you no oaths of loyalty, for all that I have not challenged your rule. Gob remains where he is. If you want him, you’ll have to take him by force. Are you ready for that?” Liara asked.
I’d expected some contributions from my companions by this point. They were never short on criticism. Maria especially was prone to calling me an idiot, or Leosi to challenging my leadership qualities. They were silent but for the creaking of leather and the clink of chain as they shifted positions, preparing for a fight.
“Do it,” I said.
Ashley blinked into stealth and a few seconds later the Bloodwitch was crying out as twin daggers buried themselves in her back. It was on.
Ritual of Numbing
Leosi went straight for Liara, who straightened up to quirk a half-smile at him.
“The Lion of Genea. I remember you in your prime. It is long since past. Is it true the boy killed you?” Liara asked.
“Centuries trapped in a castle and living a life I was more than happy to have end. An unknown, when I am a tactician. I know you, Queen of Pain,” Leosi said.
I thrust at Silas the Piercing Wail with Intemperance. The man didn’t attempt to avoid the blow, letting me run him through with the flaming sword. I could smell the scent of burning flesh as he began to scream.
Agonized Cries
My new armor helped, I could feel the darkness absorbing some of that sound and sending it away into the void. It couldn’t get all of it, the wail tore through flesh and bone. It was like a grindstone crushing my innards and I collapsed to the ground.
I wasn’t the only one affected, Ashley too was staggering backward with a dazed look.
Hail of Blood
The blood seeping from the Bloodwitch’s open wounds spun through the air like a thing alive and turned into tiny frozen spears which pelted Ashley. Where each of them touched her armor or flesh, it began to sizzle and melt.
That was two of these enemies using our own attacks against us. Liara had been expecting us to come on the offensive, she was ready
for it.
Leosi alone was untouched by the screams. Even the spiders covering Maria were writhing in torment. The ritual of numbing he’d invoked must have rendered him immune to pain. I wish he’d chosen to share that much preparation with the rest of us.
Leosi had drawn a sword I didn’t recognize, the edge glistening with a brilliant gleam. He swung at Liara, who reached out to grab the blade with her bare hand. It was the move of someone who knew her strength, but a moment later she staggered backward. Where her palm met the blade, the flesh had changed from perfect total darkness to the white of marble.
“What have you done, Lion?” Liara said, her voice cold and dangerous.
“I’ve done as I always do. I’ve come prepared. I don’t need to kill you, Liara. I need to change you. The blade of the sun containing all of the power of that light,” Leosi said, as they circled each other.
In daylight Liara changed aspects and was devoted to pleasure instead of suffering. Leosi was trying to change her. It was a bold plan. I might not like him, but he truly was a brilliant tactician.
Liara tilted her head. “My respect, Lion. You could never have killed me, but you might have accomplished this.”
Leosi was not letting himself get distracted and he pivoted with a thrust that should have impaled Liara. Despite knowing what would happen she again caught the blade, with both hands this time, and held it.
The two stood there with locked gazes, Liara’s arms trembling as white oozed through them. Transforming her by degrees.
“What are you doing? You could have dodged that,” Leosi said.
“Brave Lion. Do not forget we both need to fear the light,” Liara said, and with her massive strength snapped the sword in two.
Light exploded in the room. The very essence of sunlight as the full magic of the sword was released in one singular explosion.
It was like a switch had been flicked. Liara was again bleached completely white, a vivid contrast to the dark room.
Leosi was back on the Crucible Shard which meant his vampiric nature was in full effect. Leosi being a vampire in a sunstorm. Leosi burned.
