—
[INCANDESCENCE]: War is vengeance, war is wrath. War is the rain that will wash away the scum of this fell earth.
Pantokrator is Koinon's proudest atrocity. Neat grid-line streets and lilac synthetic trees within cross-shaped walls, its fortified acropolis atop an ancient reactor hosting Scrytegon Armatos' sprawling, domed estate. So secure do they believe themselves behind the bulwark of brave Phalanx Theseus the city's roof is drawn up only for Deluge, and emergency.
They display the fruits of their victories and slave raids against the Progeny everywhere. Fields of emerald fleece, harvested from Kora-selves buried alive to their scalps in reality pots that trap them inside delusions and stimulate hair growth, lay just beyond the walls. Sentry pillars are manned by mutilated hylic kora-staples, their hands replaced with floodlights, their voiceboxes replaced with air raid sirens, their ears and tongues modified for echolocation, bolted in place. Other staples perform duties for sibling masters, and pillowed pleasure for social patrons.
Tonight, it ends. Tonight, Phalanx Theseus falls. Tonight, Pantokrator dies.
You only find out on the way that the two prongs are a feint. There is one true target: Thymos, and from there, the Lapsarian Lung. Koinon spies have been misled, then executed en masse, their heads detached and turned into the fruits of speaking trees that can unroot the secrets of their minds. Among them are traitor-selves of Cube Eros, who never accepted the Conclave at the end of the schisomachia, instead allying themselves with the flesh-worshippers.
For them the Conclave has a special punishment in mind. The purge catches them off guard, and so does the feint. The phalanxes of Koinon are out of position - Theseus had not yet mobilized, expecting the main attack to come within a week. They also do not expect the whole of the Progeny to come on battle-clouds - not since the Myriad had there been such a fleet assembled.
Their arrogance will be their downfall.
Undermining wallbreakers detonate depth charges that swallow whole border posts into tunnels dug for years under the border. Egophages shut down machine-defenses, and sonic-bombs fill the black noise of cyberspace with 180-decibel shockwaves that kill those closest and attract info-serpents, disabling electronics and organs. By the time the sentry-staples point their floodlights at the night's clouded sky and distend their mouths to screech in alarm, it is too late for Phalanx Theseus.
Heaven has come, and come for them.
The thermoptic camouflage drops, and midnight is bathed in the false day of an amber, hostile sky. Molten plasma-rain falls in sheets on the city's shield, breaching it within minutes, melting shelters, melting skin. Giant sophian biomecha descend on the gates, slaughtering the guards meant to seal the city walls. Loitering machine-munitions, trained to seek pneumatic souls, crash down and incinerate those psychic siblings whose warp-signature surge as they call on their powers. Those few ornithopters that manage to get into the sky have their pilots impaled by the needle-lances of flying heart-caste seraphim, and plummet in spiral streaks of blood from their cockpits. Facades, giant floating icons of Kora surrounded by artillerists, destroy arsenals, depots, and anti-air emplacements.
And then Immaculate Sympathy unfurls her wings, and gives the order for the copse: rain-drop. There is a cheer, and your own heart beats from excitement. The sixty hand-caste copse-selves jump from the cloud above Humility's Sophian, while the heart-caste follows Sympathy as she accelerates, manipulating air to form a jet-stream, unleashing thermobaric explosions beneath her you feel of the heat of even from the sky.
Your first kill is on landing, as your spiked shock-cushioned boots land on a Social infantryman, and he crumples beneath your terminal velocity.
You don't have time to register the splash of crimson around you is the remains of a dead man before a stranger, a woman with segmented gunmetal armor and a plumed helmet with noseguard and cheek-pieces, charges at you. She is screaming, wailing, for her 'husband'. You do not know what that is. You think it is a Koinon designation, for a type of loved one.
Her death is another blur, as your tripwire activates, and you plunge your vibrating enamel blades into her lungs and out the other side. Only as her head lolls and her helmet rolls off, do you see she has an abyssal nail in her forehead.
A hylic, like you. But a stranger. But a hylic. But a stranger. But a hylic. But a stranger.
Globules of a red and viscous fluid pour onto you. You push her away, and she clutches at the wounds like holes punched through her chest, trying in vain to put the fluid back inside. She is breathing so fast, but the air is coming from the holes, and not her mouth. For a second, unthinking, you reach down to try and help her, but then she stiffens, and falls over, dead.
There is a ringing in your ears. Hand-caste selves in their warmasks butcher unprepared phalangites around you. Some are unarmored, and dragged out by their hair from homes. They seem to prefer to couple, in groups of two, and sometimes three. Some of them call, voices cracking, for their teacher, or their wife. Some sound young, fresh prints. The trigger is pulled on them all the same. This, you're told in excitement by a passing copse-self, is the meaning of a sack.
Towering Koinon tripods, great analog war machines winding their way through the streets to try and protect citizens, are leapt upon and ripped, limb by limb, by Sophians, who relish the opportunity to inflict themselves on an enemy better designed to abduct young Kora-selves from border copses.
This is vengeance, though. This is vengeance. They are strangers, atrocious, and cruel. You walk, dazed, towards a barricade on the main street, before a monument of some Koinon hero, and flare your terror field to support the copse's push. Maybe they'll surrender.
Please surrender?
The soldiers there cower, and try to run before your field, but then a thermobaric explosion from Sympathy strikes them, and they are cooked inside their carapaces.
They didn't surrender. It's their fault.
A cheer erupts, and howls of pure horror from those few Pantokratians they decide to capture alive, bound up, to be dragged to stranger isolates and forced to pay face-tax.
Immaculate Sympathy, masked and drenched in gore and soot, hovers before the main square. Impaled on her pike, struck in the chest by her at Mach 3, is the Scrytegon Armatos, twitching, cooking alive from the oxygen fire she lit within his lungs. He had tried to rally the defense, and called out psychically to give the city courage to resist. Immaculate Sympathy heard the call, and made for him.
You don't recognize her, then, as Sympathy. As superior. As Immaculate. It's as the Conclave said - This is the angel of death. She is the angel of death.
You will only understand later this is mercy. The remainder of Phalanx Theseus surrender, with the scrytegon dead. The city is leveled, the fleece-selves dug up and freed (though they beg to be put back into the pots that were made for them), the nursery prints hiding in the city's sewers allowed to leave under flag of truce.
That was not the plan of the Jasmine Shore's copses, who had been digging mindworm pits outside the city and collecting lists of nursery-prints in eager anticipation of the feeding.
Your own copse approves of the approach, and you find yourself confused by their compassion - only to understand they are telling you this as you chat in the battle-clouds barracks, their war-masks off.They do not have such thoughts, with their war-mask on.
Yes. It is all just. The conduct of a just war, against the flesh-worshippers, against the strangers. What you were conditioned for. What you were made for.
Any other feeling you have is a malfunction. Nothing more.
—
[LIVING WEAPON]: War is the final and the ultimate game. War is salvation and damnation. War is God.
The Alveolar Symposium declares hyperventilation after the disaster at Pantokrator, an emergency levy of every free human in Koinon. Every city, town, kleruchy, is to provide arms to socials, sentient, siblings, and march at once to the defense of the Republic.
There is a reversal at High Kur, when the puppet urn-soldiers of the Undying Lord are routed by the Scrytegon Hyperion, and forced to flee back into their immortal fortresses. The Bronze-King, rushing on Cube Indigo and Cybaris, can only admonish his vassal, and promise after Morow's Army of Tomorrow routs and Indigo's wall cracks, they will trample Koinon beneath the godhost's feet.
Tetras' armies arrive at the ruins of Pantokrator, and provide support to the Progeny. Crystal fusions of dozens or hundreds of disciples into a single gestalt, eight-armed combat spider gurus and holy Devas many meters tall with twenty arms and twenty legs and twenty faces march alongside you, their old enemies, who once forced them to wear the masks they now wear gladly.
For, as Sympathy remarks to you one night you spend playing a board-game together in her cloud-cabin, the Progeny and Tetras are rivals, but Koinon's psychic mastery poses existential threats to the eusocial Tetrasi cults. How can you trust a disciple that accepts whispers not just from the fellows of his cult, but from beyond the mortal ken?
A new defensive line has formed against you, before Cube Thymos. Phalanx Sesostris, whose holographic banner is a cryptik glyph, and who employ the relic-machines of the shardlight pyramids, and Phalanx Ixion, biomechanical symbiotes who bond from printing with four-legged machines to form centaurs, their holographic banner an archaic bow and arrow.
You dodge flayers of gauss and monsters of the ancient, deep tombs, whose construction is unlike any other on this planet. They are ordered by metal-whisperers of the Adikian wasteland, who have some ancestral connection to the bizarre insectoid scarabs and terrifying centipedes of living metal. After sustaining early casualties to their relic weapons, the copse learns the counter: target the metal-whisperers, and their commanded machines will disable almost at once, without their own individual will. Egophages snipe them, wallbreakers target them with explosives, Humility's Sophian aims at them first, and you cut them to pieces.
As you examine the inhuman glyphs on the disabled machines, you almost wish Melancholy was here to suss out this mystery. But then, as you watch a copse-self scrape the heap of her nursery-sister turned to ashes from a gauss flayer - maybe not. Maybe not.
Combat stimulants you borrow from other selves reduce these thoughts. They reduce thought, generally. That's good. You think it would help if you stopped thinking. You ask Sympathy for regret-inhibitors. She asks why, and you ask her if it will get easier. If any of this will get easier.
She shakes her head. It's never gotten easier for her.
So you repeat your request, and after a beat, she requisitions them for you.
It becomes so much easier, after that.
Regret-inhibitors make it fun. You can focus on your craft. It's incredible the number of ways to cut the limbs off a centaur. They are so brave, a warrior culture of the barren wastelands molded and 'civilized' by Koinon. You use that against them. Bait a noble charge, then cut the back legs, then cut the front legs, then cut the head, then cut the torso. You are really good at it. You are learning all kinds of things you're good at.
Pneumatics are not safe from you. The terror field makes the lesser ones seize up - sometimes they're still agape when you cut off their heads, or stab them in the lungs. You target them, first - the pneumatic centaurs have a particular penchant for trying to flay the skin off your copse-sisters to wear for themselves. They don't get to do that. You'll flay theirs, instead. That seems fairer - theirs is so much uglier than yours.
And when the malfunction creeps in, and you don't see arms and legs and torsos, but the pieces of a person, then you up the dosage of your inhibitors. And the copse is supportive. They know the feeling.
Vehement Humility helps you manage the withdrawal, the trembling, the yawning guilt. She has her own special stash. She has been taking them since she was three. That's a requirement for a heart-caste Kora, especially a pilot. A sophian cannot hesitate. It cannot think. It cannot feel.
You have become so good the copse respects you. Even your sword-singing has improved. A psychic centaur knocks you down with a kick, your reaper-blades retracting, right arm broken at the shoulder. So you draw the sword, and whistle once, then twice, and the beam of energy turns ninety degrees, then ninety again, and cuts right through their skull. They go slack, and fall.. Three copse-selves you saved, war-masks shattered, face-plates cracked from his trampling, mob you, even though your terror-field is flared. You saved us. You protected us. Oh, thank you, Harmony. Thank you. We were so scared.
You're a hero. You're a warrior. You're a razor-saint.
And you feel nothing.
Maybe you need to up the dosage again.
Article:
AXIOM ACQUIRED
RAZORMIND (Combat). No will to break. No mind to think. No voice to cry suffering. In battle, you are a storm of blades, an unthinking instrument, a blank-eyed reaper. Combat stimulants and extreme dissociation are necessary to bear the weight of what you've done. Supercharges your LIVING WEAPON into the manual of a master butcher, and gives you a psychological dependency on military-grade regret inhibitors.
—
[NOOSPHERE]: War is invention, competition, evolution. War is the soil from which grows a garden of unearthly delights.
By the end of dronesong, three phalanxes have been utterly destroyed. A second front has been opened by Immaculate Penitence, who takes advantage of the panic to make a charge for Eros, razing Tolemais in six days of brutal fighting and continuing to the reclamation of Cube Eros, once Jade. At Kur, the offensive by Scryeton Hyperion stalls, as the Bronze-King detaches a holding vanguard of titans to delay and attrit Koinon, and the Dakaran Skywatch lends orbital fire support that Koinon cannot hope to down with conventional weapons.
Another rebellion by Carnosans in Vermillion delays the march on Cybaris again, but it is quelled and crushed with finality, the remaining meatspace Carnosan insurgents fleeing west into the wasteland.
Nothing remains except the march on Cybaris, and the doom of Morow. But on your own march to Thymos, desperation breeds innovation. Koinon is the most populous of the powers, with the highest population of staples, the greatest number of analog factories, and by far the largest number of loyal and stable cubes.
And they will not yield without a fight. The approach on Thymos is delayed again, this time not by august phalanxes - but raised cube-militia. You kill five of a phalangite file, and ten take their place. They call forward hylics, and augment them into "harpy flocks", shoot the fliers with ballistas at your lines. They target your heart-caste fliers, outnumbering them six to one.
Hundreds, thousands of buzzing ornithopters swarm the sky, each one shot down replaced by another, and another, and another. Once, when an ornithoper's shot down, your curiosity overtakes you, and you speed to the cockpit. Opening it, you find a Carnosan staple, just a chest and a head attached directly to the controls. You push his virtual reality headset up, and he cries.
He was a hummingbird in Carnosa. He only wanted to kiss flowers. They chose him for his preternatural capacity for flight without training, but he was never meant to kill. He only wanted to kiss flowers.
He kills himself by detonating his kamikaze satchel, before you get the chance. It's not a useful experience. You wonder if you up your dosage enough you'll forget about it.
All the while, you fight for every inch of their soil which was once your soil. Layers upon layer of trenches, maze-illusions, minefields, psychic pit-traps, spiderholes, and assassins targeting commanders and warminds. Precognitive artillery with pneumatics that can predict your next step, your next move, that can sense your souls from miles away, raining down shells that do not miss.
They are fanatics. There are no surrenders, anymore. Koinon phalangites take voluntary oath-staples that detonate their brain-stem if they attempt it, should their will falter. It doesn't make sense. This is not what war is. They should have been beaten. They should have been defeated. They should have bowed. They will destroy themselves before you get the chance to destroy them.
You are running out of machine-munitions. The copse's heart-caste is dwindling by the week. The remainder's faces are ashen - the hylic harpies have been promised voices, permanent homes, private property, marriage, if they fight. They will do anything for that.
The hand-caste must improvise anti-air weapons from your heavier plasma cannons, just to have a chance against everything Koinon floods into the sky.
The Tetrasi should be coping better. Their cults are used to fanatic war. But Koinon's infantry are deploying analog anti-gestalt missiles that disrupt their connections with cheap e-war viruses. They will strike a deva with six, seven, ten, then fire conventional rockets until their crystal body falls apart, and an entire cult dies in the collapse of a single war-deva. They do not feel trauma, the way individuals do - but it is clear their cults are more morose each passing day. They keep to themselves, withdraw, and no longer perform the dances and meditations which focus and clear the consciousness of their minds.
Dust has started. Snow is falling. But there is no end in sight.
You develop new tactics with the selves and Sympathy, share ideas. Night-raids, shock-attacks, asymmetry. Less use of the clouds, which are vulnerable to ornithopter swarms and harpies, more undermining tunnels, more use of smoke and other analog obscurers that make it harder to mass fire on you.
You protect each other, as you cut them down. You safeguard each other's backs, when you cut them down. Dutiful Radiance, who used to be your technical partner in peacetime, has her legs blown off by a snare mine- but you don't leave her behind. You carry her on your back to your own forward trench, dodging fire with your tripwire all the while.
Just like martyrdom classes, you say, and she starts crying while the copse's stillmasons stem the bleeding from her missing half. She didn't mean to be mean to you. She's sorry. She's so sorry. They made her. The devouts made her. But it's no excuse. You're a creepy witch, but she didn't think that meant she should have been so cruel. She doesn't even remember why they were so cruel.
You hold her hand while she blabbers in delirium. You barely remember her comment, but you do remember she shared her organ-rations with you several times on this campaign, and the two of you had bets on who would die first.
"Do you really want a
hylic to win that bet?" you promise her, as witchy as you have ever been.
She laughs at that, distracted from looking down the operating table at where her legs were. "I'd never let a creepy witch beat me."
At least tonight, you don't win. Thank Kora. She's sent back to the copse, legless, declared a wounded martyr.
Later that night, you smoke incense outside on the platform of the landed battle-cloud with Vehement Humility, and she helps you inject another regret-inhibitor spike.
She tells you did good, and that she's sorry too.
"For what happened in the copse?"
She nods. "You used to be a weird softie who was honest in the creepiest ways. And too charming for a hylic. We hated it, but I don't even remember why. Maybe it was conditioned into us, or maybe it's easier to say that than to admit we were just supreme assholes."
You're not used to this, let alone from her. It makes you uncharacteristically sheepish. "I mean, That's the whole idea. I am a pariah." There's a lot more you could say, could have said - but war has made that wound in your heart smaller, even it has opened many new and novel ones.
She snorts to that, easing up.
You think on it, as you two smoke. "How about…you just make it up to me, after the war, and I hold it over you the rest of our lives?"
Humility holds the incense stick a few centimeters from her lips, stopped in place. "After the war…" she takes a deep drag, and exhales. "I'm not sure there will be an after."
The tone shifts, turns conspirational. She's letting you in on something you've contemplated yourself. It's a rare act of trust from another copse-self.
"Then you've thought it too," you say, careful not to voice the treason in your mind too loud. Rates of egocide and desertion have been rising among frontline copses, and the ego-taming disciplinaries are keeping close watch of your behavior.
"I think," she says, voice low in the darkness, as a flurry of white falls on her and you, "that Immaculate Sympathy's punishment never stopped. They just extended it to the whole copse. It's why they keep refusing us shore leave, and keep refusing her requests to pull us off the front."
"Then you're saying it's intentional. They're trying to kill us."
"I'm saying," Humility breathes, static forming in her hair from brooding wrath, "that the perfect martyr has no attachments. Just because she put her pontiff's halo back on means nothing. She was defective, and defied them. And she's attached to us. To you, too. You can tell how she keeps committing to strategies that try to keep our casualties down, how she's working without sleep to cover us when we're fighting. She's a one-woman army, but it's wearing her down."
"So it's easier - it's easier, if they send us to the front, and we all die. Then they can have their perfect instrument, without distractions, without attachments. One more useful than any of us are, individually. They do it with Revenant hearts, sometimes, I've heard. Widow them from their battle-lovers so that the Revenant can be molded into something fully theirs."
You see it in your mind's eye. "A Kora isn't supposed to truly devote herself anyone, but Her. True love of another self is…"
"It's an obstacle," Humility finishes what you could not.
Your stomach drops. Even the regret inhibitor cannot suppress the feeling. You knew it, but you never dared say it so bluntly.
You suck in a breath through your teeth. "Then what do we do?"
Humility fixes you with a sharp, defiant glare. "The same thing you helped Radiance do, tonight. Survive, and spite them all to the demiurge's spiral hell."
You harden your own gaze, and lock arms with her. "Survive, and spite them all to spiral hell," you vow.
For the first time in your life, you might have a copse that believes in you, and wants you. Not as a witch, but as a person. You need this. You need to keep them alive. For your sake. For theirs.
But it is not a promise you, or she, can keep.
On the battlefield, no one is the master of their own fate.
—
[RHYTHMS]: War is a machine with fuel of blood and gears of flesh, the droning whir of its inhuman mechanism drowning out the cries of torment.
The Bronze-King tramples Morow's Army of Tomorrow, and lays waste to the hub of Seldon. The route to Indigo is open, and the Godhost is on the march - but the collapse of High Kur's resurrected armies in the onslaught by three elite Koinon phalanxes demands more titans be diverted north. And still, the march on Thymos crawls on. Now, with the conscripts thinning, Koinon deploys its machine menagerie.
Though every techno-state might have a stockpile, only Koinon kept such great numbers of feral machines, caught from wastelands like the Void Scar or the Monoliths, even manufactured in captivity. With psychic manipulation, they are the masters of controlling these machines, as with the nerve staple, the dreamfeast machine which they were first to domesticate. And for Kora, on both the Eros and the Thymos front, they offer only their best monsters.
Feral face-testers with thermoptic camouflage fill the tunnels, pop the faceplates off ambushed selves with tusks, then mimic their voices, screeching and wailing to call concerned friends and lovers into ambush. Ribbonteeth, synthetic starfish buried in Dust's powdered snow, jump up on marching Koras and wrap them with molared tentacles, squeezing tight until bones snap and carapace cracks. Mezmerons, ten-meter synthetic worms with four egophagic mandible-plates that flashbang the senses and paralyze victims, fold themselves into near two-dimensional flatworms and slither at impossible speeds in the bottom layer of the dust, then unfurl like an accordion inside a bunker, flashbang the inhabitants, and gorge on entire copses.
But the Progeny is adapting, too. The first mannequins are ready - the bodies of apostate-koras fighting for Koinon, reconfigured. Their legs are reattached in wrong places, elbows on elbows, skull put back upside down, stapled, and trained to seek stranger blood. They scuttle on all fours at high speeds under the fields of dust, appearing inside Koinon trenches and mutely ripping apart phalangites.
Root-bombs dig deep vines into a bunker, chewing through stone and metal, before detonating and collapsing entire tunnel networks. Kora Irontamers, on galloping pegascenes and sharp-taloned, speeding velociraptrons, support trench-line charges by infantry, sophians, facades, and Tetrasi Devas. Strike teams target precognitive artillery teams, killing the spotting psykers first.
You are often at the front-line. Jazz tunes out the sound, and inhibitors tune out the feeling. You decrease the resolution of your optics, reduce the detail - to tune out the sight.
A self dies to ribbonteeth you cannot pry or cut off her. A wallbreaker, 23 Diligent Serenity, disappears in the sapping tunnels, and three hours later her voice is calling out for her nursery-sisters to come down and help her. Immaculate Sympathy opts instead to fill the entire tunnel with fire. The scream turns from Serenity's, to that of two other missing selves, and then a machine whir, before the face-tester synthetic shell melts, and it turns to ash.
The fighting blurs together. Cleave the machine, cleave the human, cleave the machine. Time slows down, then speeds up, then slows down, then speeds up. You learn to swordsing your hardlight saber to three angles, then four, then five, but you're too distracted by the mezmeron with the outline of a copse-self in its stomach to pay attention to the milestone. 7 Diligent Radiance is still alive when you cut her out, but she is not well. She will not go back to battle, and spends every night crying. She needs to stop malfunctioning, but she won't. You plead for her to stop malfunctioning. You saved her. She's alright.
But she isn't. Her mind isn't.
One day, war-masked ego-tamers on behalf of a disciplinary cloud take her away with them, and you do not see her again.
They say they will fix her. But the copse has doubts that's what they'll do.
The Progeny need bodies more than they need thinking beings. There are ways for them to use her that don't require thought.
Sometimes you wish they'd offer those ways to you, and end this. When those thoughts creep on you, you stay those nights with Immaculate Sympathy. She never questions, and never refuses, and even, without you asking, holds you.
She's the only one who could stand to do so, with how cold you have become.
—
[INFOWAR]: War is organized terror, war is militarized nightmare, war is the complete and utter destruction of sense, and of the senses.
You don't think much of the petriform gas, at first. The shell strikes your assault team and disperses gray-black smoke, and then a wind carries it away. All techno-states use chemical weapons, unleash neurotoxins and gas attacks on their enemies. Your energy-shield protects you, their war-masks protect them. Or so you thought.
After the raid, Dutiful Faith, Melody, and Verity complain of itching, but their skin is fine. The next day, the itch spreads to their stomach, but they cannot reach it. It's inside. They start to scratch harder, longer. They start coughing, and then wheezing. That's not normal. Humans do not wheeze that way. Humans do not get
ill. Panacea in your veins is meant to abolish disease. They develop nanocancers, they are hacked, but this is none of those. This is not decay - it is corruption.
Something is growing inside them. And Immaculate Sympathy can feel it too, through her psychic link. You have never seen her as shaken as when she reaches out and sees what is attaching to their souls. She spends as much time as she can with them, in their beds. They keep scratching - they start to try and break their carapace open to get it out. And then the black crystal growths appear on their skin.
It is hard to describe. It is hard to watch. The filtration system of the warmasks was not designed for the gas, because it is not a normal gas. It is intentional. It is a thinking disease. It wants inside you, and waits carefully, settling on masks and then maneuvering inside. There are no stillmasons who can combat it. Who can find a cure. They have never seen it before.
The only thing they agree on is that it doesn't affect you. It doesn't attack you. The growths spread on them, and you are fine. You stay with them throughout it, and you are fine. The crystals start to go for joints, make it impossible to move, impossible to
eat, and you are fine. Why are you fine? Why do you deserve to be fine, while they die like this? Can't you take away, just a little pain?
And why do these crystals remind you of the void crystals in the copse, of the crystals used by null witches?
You try to reach out yourself, but your null field is optimized for terror. And when you use your wireframe warpsight, the reflection in the crystal focuses a fetid, green-tinted eye upon you.
In a grotesque, gargle, it promises that you cannot save them. You have avoided its gifts long enough.
And it's right. Nothing can. The infection spreads through their bodies. Their symbiont shuts down, and every pain that it has suppressed comes out. The pain of breathing in air with so much sulfuric acid. The pain of inhospitable barometric pressure, and water without organic nutrients. The pain of eating rotten organic rations, and having just one meal a day. The pain of the nanocancers. And the pain of the crystal itself.
You are with them every day. You made a vow. You made a promise. But you can't stop this. You can't arrest this. Your null field does not work. It has been engineered so your null field cannot work.
Immaculate Sympathy makes a split decision that almost has you draw your blade on her. She orders all of your assault team-members shot, and burns the bodies with a white-hot sacred fire, crystal and all. She tells you, tells all of you, it is the only one to save the soul. You believe her. You have to believe her.
But it doesn't hurt less.
And it only provokes more questions, from the surviving copse-selves, now so few that you can form a single-row circle around the bonfire of the afflicted.
How could it take your soul? You're safe, aren't you? You're behind the psychic shield, aren't you? The Lapsarian Lung, and Kora's soul-grove protect you, don't they?
She shakes her head.
"Something has found its way through. And Koinon has let that something in."
As if on cue, a voice speaks from within the flames, evil and unknown. It promises this is a mere preview of coming attractions, mocking the speech of Mr. Morow. It feels like a lifetime go you watched it - but that was a mere seven months past.
We have such sights to show you.
After that, after you watch them die, in those horrible weeks, in the face of this unadulterated evil, you regain a feeling.
Hatred.
