12 Miles Below

The old gods had likely seen just about everything happen at least three times.

Somehow, I get the feeling stealing a godsdamned Feather was brand new to everyone anyhow.

The upper team here were already packed and ready to go. Rather, they had mostly been packed by the time Wrath ferried me up past the whirlpool. Of the entire expedition, what remained were seven. Icestride prime and his subordinate Loraii, two knights from House Stormsweeper, Ankah and her two minions. They were prepared for a hard fight, and it had been one.

At the start.

The Shadowsongs and Icestrides held the center chamber, while the two Stormsweepers went out chasing the drakes. They came back flush with trophies and from there on the machine offensive ground to a halt. Caves were collapsed, mines detonated, traps triggered, until the machines were forced down one death funnel with a group of unkillable relic knights on the other end.

When trying to kill the knights didn’t work for the machine army, they tried scaling the walls and jumping down into the center chamber from the top floor. But so long as the clan knights stayed together, no amount of Screamers seemed enough to overwhelm them. Rotations, redeployments, and mobility kept the away team alive and in charge. Icestride already had plenty of experience running circles around machines back when they didn’t have the winterblossom technique, occult fractals, nor the sheer number of relic armor.

And then Avalis died, and the machines up here decided to throw out the snow and close airlock. Or Avalis himself had recalled them, seeing no reason to waste resources now that he’d failed. Regardless, the machines took one big step back and went sulking deeper into the tunnel, regrouping.

That’s how Wrath found the expedition team. Preparing for the next wave, and taking the opportunity to load up the hover sleds for any hasty exit. When they saw Wrath fly up, they all knew it was over for good. Now they had a Feather on top of their current odds. And she could fly.

Not great for the enemy side when half the temple had lost ceilings.

Wrath then went on to ferry the rest of us up, one at a time. Up until she brought Father along. But by then, Kidra and I had explained the whole thing to the group, so they weren’t surprised at the Feather that had previously been harassing them in tunnels and stealing their knightbreakers. Nervous, but that quickly went away the moment Father’s voice came through.

Tenisent had been a lifelong pillar to their group in life, the relic knight people turned to when they sought to improve their blade skills. Having him back in action in the real world instead of just a specter floating around in the digital one was extremely welcome to the group. And I think they also took an extra bit of vindictive joy in knowing the knightbreaker pickpocket had his own shell pickpocketed. Play around in the snow for too long, and you’ll lose a thumb. And hand. And apparently an entire body, though that’s way past what the idiom was supposed to warn about.

We’d have gone home earlier too, but there was still one more member left. Wrath flew down into the whirlpool to extract him from the lower strata, a lone relic knight from house Arcbound. Small house. Great knight who’d earned a reputation for a few crushing victories against slavers.

As for what he was doing down by the mite forge, that’s a little more complicated. The rest of the dead clan knights had been originally transferred over to Tenisent’s pendant, where he helped them settle in. Then, Captain Sagrius’s accident needed hands on triage. When his armor was falling off into the depths, the disembodied souls and Father all came to a snap agreement.

They’d stay behind on the armor’s spare soul fractals, while he remained in the pendant - which was promptly launched my way as a last second pass.

That turned out to save my life a few dozen times over, but Sagrius had vanished under that whirlpool and we couldn’t find any trace of him on the other side. Wrath went looking for him too, only finding broken catwalks, lasered in half. Avalis had had time to try and kill the knight while preparing for me, and if he hadn’t succeeded, he’d certainly made sure he wouldn’t be around.

The skyscrapers went down deep. Real deep. Most of them weren’t even anchored on a ground surface, their bases were floating in midair by mite scrapshit. As the strata widened further under, the area became a maze. If I were the captain, being attacked by a small army of drakes and screamers trying to surround and eliminate me, I’d have dove into the snow. Killed my chasers, thrown off the trail, and gone deep into hiding. Which also meant we’d have just as little a chance to find him as the enemy had.

As for the possibility that the drakes and Avalis had managed to kill Sagrius, Wrath and I were mostly convinced that wasn’t the case.

He had six veteran knights all there with him, an armor filled with fractals, and running Father’s combat engram. Not to mention we had video footage of him tanking To’Sefit’s beams with ease, due to whatever happened to his soul. Captain Sagrius may be the most dangerous thing walking around in the lower strata right now. And the clan didn’t exactly migrate every year either, we’d be on the map for decades to come.

As Icestride concluded: He’d come to us. All we needed to do was wait.

He’d made the call to focus on what we had to work with instead, and go back to the surface. We couldn’t afford to stay here for long, no telling what Avalis was planning.

But we could afford one last bit of help from the mite forge.

And so back to Fang Arcbound. He’d been one of the knights cut up by To’Sefit’s initial ambush. In the confusion, the knights had only been able to recover one of the two that died. Arcbound had been left behind in no-man’s land, a soul trapped inside his armor.

He didn’t panic, simply biding his time instead. Checking the bounds of his abilities, testing what he could and couldn’t do, conversing with the armor on his options.

Wrath flew over and yanked his armor up and back to the group. From there, we discussed ways to bring him back into the world. We’d debated having a spare soul fractal tapping into the armor’s systems, letting him influence it like Father had with Witnerscar Prime. But the armor was just as likely to run into hardlocks that would treat the intrusion as a virus. Arcbound had his own suggestion - cut him free from the armor itself, and have the forge construct a new relic armor for him like it had with Father.

It was a good suggestion. Problem was that now the mites had gotten stingy.

I’d been left alone with it for the past half hour while all of this was being done, having been the near last member to be ferried up. And I hadn’t spent that half hour tweedling thumbs. I’d asked the forge for basically everything I could think of, from occult books, gear, items, money, and down the list onwards.

My original ‘payment’ for the quantum cube was still technically pending as I’d yet to fulfill my side of that bargain, and probably wouldn’t for a small lifetime. So asking for more might have been seen as a little greedy on my part. Or at least that was my theory. They were now asking for ridiculous things. Not ridiculous in that it was asking for me to indenture my soul for the next thousand years. I mean outright made up nonsense.

“Fine. How about some kind of long range weapon that can shoot some kind of undodgeable homing lighting that melts everything it touches?” I had asked.

>Offer: Electromagnetic Pulse Laser-guided Plasma Channel. (Infantry prototype version. Modification by United Earth Machine Defense Force) (Quantity: 1)

>Payment Required: 10 Argon Crystals of AGS 0

What in the white wastes were argon crystals? And what’s AGS 0 even mean in this contex? No idea, and the forge didn’t want to answer.

“How about a book on occult fractals?”

>Offer: Acausal Forces Examined, Third Edition. (Pirated copy) (Quantity: 1)

>Payment Required: 451 Denarius

I nearly scrubbed my hair in frustration, except the helmet was in the way. “Anyone know what a Denarius is? Some kind of gem? Journey?”

Cathida crackled over my comms. “Not a clue about that deary. Memory banks only got the basics, and whatever Journey saw along the way. Denarius never showed up in that time.”

I had asked the mite forge a few dozen more requests, trying to finagle something out of it. Anywhere from asking materials it listed for other requests, to asking it for maps or locations of said resources. Sometimes it gave me cyclical answers. If I wanted to have it create a ‘woven basket of nanofibers’ then it wanted a third era flatscreen television, complete with a bunch of serial numbers too because any general television screen wasn’t good enough. And to make a flatscreen television, it wanted a basket of nanofibers. At that point, I was mostly certain it was having a good ol 'giggle at my expense.

And it wasn’t me as the factor the mites were picking on.

When Arcbound requested for a new armor, it similarly gave him the runaround. Which left us stuck a bit. Mite forge didn’t want to cooperate, no new relic armor for the wandering spirit to take over.

Until we realized we did have one armor that didn’t have any spirit already inhabiting it. The ruins of the armor Father used to fight against Avalis. It had done its job, and been built specifically with no existing artificial soul. So that’s what we rolled with, leaving the mite forge behind.

Wrath brought the empty armor back with us, past the whirlpool where she laid it down, fixing parts of it using the gathered power cells and materials. Had those in spades, given the destruction the temple team had caused. If only the mite forge had wanted a few dozen of these, life would be great.

While the operation on Arcbound’s new armor was in progress, Icestride and kidra were deep in discussion on the best way forward with Father’s new shell.

“We’ll need to do something about your appearance, Tenisent.” Icestride noted, forced to look up to meet Father’s gaze. “Or simply keep your actual identity under wraps, and be officially recognized as a new member brought in by Kidra.”

Kind of hard to hide the giant walking around. Or the girl with wings. Assuming they can fix the vampire tone skin and white hair. Red eyes only made that entire problem worse.

“The girl was able to modify parts of herself to blend in with humans. I can do the same.” He answered back, voice still adjusting. "It will be handled." Father’s command over the stolen Feather shell was improving by the minute, now he focused purely on the polish. Facial emotions, sound, combat algorithms, controlling godsdamned nano swarms inside letting him create anything he wanted, and all that good stuff I wasn’t envious about in the slightest.

In this case, it was Wrath’s turn to be smug about something. She’d learned from Father originally, and now she’s in charge of teaching him how to Feather. The tech stuff was harder on him, but everything that involved moving the shell was near perfect already.

“I’ve completed repairs on the soul fractal.” Wrath reported, standing up from the limp armor before her. “Systems within seem to be functional, only dormant. We can attempt the transfer over. As I understand, human souls don't need a medium in order to travel from fractal to fractal?”

Icestride gave a quick nod to both Wrath and Lorri, who’d been holding onto Acrbound’s cut off soul fractal. Small thing in her hands, about as big as all the other armor scraps we’d recovered. She approached the hollow armor, knelt down next to Wrath and drew her hand near the chestplate.

The suit remained motionless for a moment, before twitching and rising up like a comatose patient waking back to life, so I assume the transfer worked out. A hand flexed testing balance. Voice crackled. “Movement works. Voice too.” He said, fully standing back up in the feral Winterscar armor. “Reckon I’ll have to do something with all this red. My House won't be happy to be involved in that shitstorm happening in the north end of the clan.”

Father turned to the knight. “Keep the armor, Arcbound. Your House will have need of it far more than mine.”

He laughed at that. “I reckon you do happen to have a clan’s worth of armors already, along with a warlock of your own. And now two Feathers to the tally. Atius will have a migraine. Clan lords were supposed to keep the balance from spiraling out of control like this over years. He pretends to die for a few weeks and all the freeze melts.”

“Politics will be dealt with inevitably.” Father said, eyes panning over to us. “If not by myself, then by someone more suited for the role.”

“Unfortunately, there’s very little we can do to realign the clan.” Kidra said, taking the cue, pointing at Wrath and Father.

"That's the understatement of century." One of the Stormsweepers chuckled. "Appeasing the Houses is going to be a full time job. I both envy and don't envy you lot. The baths are going to be utter chaos, that's for sure. Going to need to avoid those when Winterscars are around."

“We may be best served by claiming these two as Deathless passing by." Kidra said, quickly thinking through possible solutions. "It would explain Wrath’s wings at the very least. Their speed and strength in combat will inevitably be discovered as well by the greater whole.”

“Why stop at only that, Winterscar?” Ankah said from her post. “Claim these new Deathless have powers that grant speed and dexterity unto others. After all, you were sent to Capra’nor to return with help. It’s well within bounds of running into Deathless that were friendly to our pleas.”

That… was a pretty good idea. With two ‘Deathless’ running around, all the elite knights could make use of the Winterblossom technique and claim it was a supporting occult spell cast by the two newcomers. Them staying at the Winterscar compounds could be further explained with Kidra having been the one to recruit them for the clan.

“House Shadowsong is okay with giving us Winterscars a free cell like that?” I asked, a little surprised she'd just toss us a solid like that.

Ankah scoffed. “Of course not. However, I am no dimwit. Needs must as needs go, the clan’s well being goes above all.”

Icestride nodded. “We can discuss the possible methods and options we’ve got on the path home. With Arcbound back up and moving, we have no further reason to remain here.” He looked up, past the ceiling of the temple. Further off to the surface.

“It’s time we return.”

Next chapter - Hiding the tracks