I suspected the “talked for a bit” part was more involved than that, but I wouldn’t be getting more out of her on that particular subject. She’d gone from hysterical and sobbing Clara to matter-of-fact Clara in a blink. This version of Clara was the one I was most familiar with. This particular personality was always light on details.
I mentally prepared myself for this next part. “You said you had something to tell me in your note. What did Jenk tell you?”
She looked at me, confused. Then it was as if a lightbulb flashed.
“Oh, your kids. Ruth and Chris. No, that wasn’t Jenk. Thankfully for you he doesn’t seem very interested in you. He didn’t even know you were missing when we talked. He doesn’t think it’s possible for only two people to win, so you’re a non-entity to him. You’re like a backup toy to him, sitting on the shelf and getting dusty. He’ll only play with you if his favorite one breaks.”
“If the Canadian didn’t say anything, then what’s going on? What is it you’re trying to say?”
She looked for a moment as if she wasn’t going to answer. I could see her gathering up the courage. But then she continued. “So, remember before when SmashSouth told you that I had selected you and you had asked me about it? I’d told you they had thrown a bunch of pictures at me, and I was forced to pick one. So I picked yours.”
“I remember,” I said. I suddenly had a very uneasy feeling. She could do that. Clara was the human version of an unstable fault line. Fine one moment, terrifying the next.
“That was a lie,” she said. “I follow you on Instagram. I have followed you for a long time. Your Shattered Heart mural in Georgetown? I cried when I first saw it.”
That mural adorned the side of the South Seattle Nar-anon space. It depicted a heart made of glass cracked and covered in tire tracks. It wasn’t a subtle message, but sometimes these things weren’t meant to be subtle.
“Okay,” I said hesitantly. I felt as if I was standing on a precipice.
“SmashSouth had a thing. He wanted people to watch. It’s really fucked up. Before, he had a poet in here. A woman. He made her write couplets and shit about him torturing people. I think I told you about her before. They gave that one to Frank and then Princess. After that we’d had an artist, and SmashSouth was almost happy with the results. But he wanted another one. He asked me if I knew anyone. He was joking, but I answered anyway. I said yes, I knew someone. I told them about you.”
I felt cold. “You asked them to bring me in here?”
“They were going to bring someone in anyway. He asked me, and it just came out. At the time, I didn’t think they’d really pick you. But yeah, now you know. He asked me if I could think of anybody, and I blurted out your name.”
Fucking Instagram. I didn’t even know how the ancient social media platform worked. Ruth had set it up for me. Insisted it was important for artists to have a presence on there. I had an AI running that picked the best photos from my portfolio and posted them for me. I knew I had several thousand followers. Tens of thousands, actually. But I rarely looked at it or the comments.
“But why?” I asked. “You immediately thought of me? There are millions of better artists out there. You didn’t even know me.”
Clara had changed once again. She did this rapid cycling when she was angry or stressed. And now she was angry. “I picked you because I saw your mural. Don’t you understand? I saw it, and I knew you were just like me. You lost a child. You lost a son. Yes, I know exactly who you are. I know the whole story. I followed it since the beginning. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You have that hole in you. The dark place. The emptiness. You and I are the same. You don’t want to go on. How could you? How could anybody go on after that? I knew this, and I knew you because you are me. You are already dead. We both are. So I picked you before they could pick someone else.”
I sat there in stunned silence for a very long time.
How does one react to something like that?
“Clara,” I began, but then I shut my mouth. I didn’t know what I felt. I knew I was supposed to be angry. Enraged. She had lied. She was the reason I was here. She was just as culpable as Anatoly and Jenk and SmashSouth and all the others.
But I wasn’t mad at her, and it took me a long while to understand why.
How could I be mad? She was right. By god, she was right.
I was already dead. I’d been dead this whole time. If this was going to happen to somebody, and I’d been forced to make a similar choice, I’d probably do the same thing.
But now I had a purpose. That darkness, that deep well of pain, that empty place. It was not a burden, not anymore. It was a tool. Yes, I was already dead. But there were others who needed to be that way, too. And I would use every last breath to make sure it happened.
“This is what we’re going to do,” I said.
Part 5 – The Temple of the Chained Gods
Chapter 54
Feedings Left: 7
Level Up!
You are now level 46!
I threw my new attribute point into durability. My health bar inched a hair longer. It was now the same length as my soul power bar. The pavilion was a shattered mess. It had taken almost a half hour to take the boss down. I sniped him from the top of the hill from the armored protection of my chaser while Clara swept down on them from above.
The legions had been mostly zippers and a few of the larger, flaming minotaur guys called taurisians. The half-bull/half-human monsters were armed with double-headed axes that flung wind blades at you. But their range was shit, and they couldn’t easily get up my hill, not with the combined effort of my mounted pulse gun and Clara’s continued fire from above. We’d slaughtered the legions in minutes. It was just the boss who’d taken forever to kill. He only took noticeable damage when we shot him in the head and neck. And he spent most of the time under cover, throwing wind blades at Clara and ignoring me.
This was the home base of the demon lord Morax. He was level 21 in the hierarchy, and the highest demon we’d taken on so far without the help of Banksy or any of the guardians. Morax’s main form was also that of a blue taurisian. His secondary form was a bull body with a human head. Not like a centaur, but a bull with the head of a person, which was weird as shit.
I’d used my resurrect skill to raise the zippers. That had helped. The zombified ant monsters had unnerved the demon lord, and he’d fled his cover. Clara had taken him out with an aimed pulse that hit him right in the eye.
But then the giant, dead asshole had fallen backward and tumbled down the sloped hill, disappearing into the smoke. He’d been in mid-transformation between the minotaur form and the bull body/human-headed form when he died and disappeared.
I didn’t know what shape his corpse would take. I hoped and prayed it would take the taurisian form, but I wasn’t optimistic. His horns imparted an additional three points of durability with a low probability of rejection. I really wanted them.
So I needed to find the demon’s body before he regenerated. The wooden pavilion had collapsed halfway through the fight and then caught on fire. His body was in there somewhere. I abandoned my armored vehicle and approached the battlefield on foot, meeting Clara at the base of the hill. Debris and bloody bodies were strewn about.
Banksy: Did you get them? Do you need me to join the fight? I’m going to level up to 48 really soon.
Duke: They’re dead. Remember what I said. The plan won’t work if you hit level 50 before we start the endgame. You’re on reserve for now. Only kill to eat.
The ground rumbled, and Banksy emerged to our left, a vast form that showered rocks and dirt. He cast a dark shadow across the whole battlefield. Despite his enormous size, he somehow managed to make himself look like a petulant child.
“Clara,” Banksy said, his voice booming. “Tell my father to let me fight.”
“It took me a month to go from level 49 to 50,” Clara said as we poked around the wreckage. “I don’t think you have to worry about him accidentally level
ing up to 50. He’s not even 48 yet.”
“It’s not just that. He’s an experience hog,” I said.
Even though I gained experience when he did, the fractional amount I received when he just swallowed everything made these raids an inefficient use of my time. I leveled much faster when I was the one doing the killing.
But that wasn’t the real reason I didn’t want him leveling. Once he hit level 50, he would cease to be my pet, and he would replace the Shrill as my associated guardian. I really didn’t want to lose that status with the Shrill. But more importantly, I was afraid I’d lose my friend. Would he cease being Banksy? Would he still be able to talk? I didn’t know, and I was afraid to find out.
Clara looked up at Banksy. “You are an experience hog.” She turned to me. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I think 46 is the best you’re going to get in the time we have. If we do the Andras thing tomorrow that’ll give us six days.”
“Six parts in six days,” I said. Neither of us knew how long our bodies would really survive after the feeding stopped. I’m sure it wouldn’t be immediately. When I was two or three, my great-grandmother had her feeding tube removed when she was in a vegetative state. My mother talked about it often, about how awful those 10 days were. So it had taken an elderly woman 10 days to die. I didn’t know if we would be in better or worse condition. Either way, I knew the process of waking up after being asleep and untended for six months was going to be horrific. Six months for me. For Clara it had been much longer. The last thing we needed was to be extra weak from starvation. So we needed to do this now.
I’d spent every second of the past week power leveling. I’d died twice, which was a huge blow at these higher levels. Clara and I worked our way across the map, wiping out every pavilion and encampment that she hadn’t already cleared. And some she had. Before, she’d enlisted the aid of two guardians to smash through the camps. We were more surgical, hitting the smaller camps.
In addition, Clara and I worked together to heal Moritasgus and the Shrill as much as we could without having to rely on complicated surgery. The Shrill’s health had deteriorated greatly in the six months I’d been gone. But I also now boasted a full set of healing abilities, including Antiparasitic level 10.
The 10th and final level of the talent added a few more options. Upon casting, it listed every group of parasites within the guardian. From there I could select them and choose which to kill. It was extremely helpful. It automatically unchecked the heartworms, for example, which no longer had a negative effect on any kaiju.
I killed almost everything within the Shrill. I kept the pig spiders alive in case I needed them for soul power. And I kept Yoshi the giant worm outside my door alive because I had grown fond of the angry mob. I’d taken to capturing and feeding him a small pig spider every time I visited. He no longer attacked me on sight. Now he waited to see if I was going to feed him. And then he attacked me. Everything else had to go.
The Shrill’s strength before the +20% bonus was now at 91% and his health remained steady at 100%. Moritasgus was at 82% strength with 75% health. He had some sort of flu that required a complicated healing process I didn’t have time to figure out. Clara didn’t have a strength bonus for Avvinik or the Opera, but she kept both of them over 95% strength and 100% health.
I also spent the time learning to use and preparing the Shrill’s cockpit. This took much longer than I anticipated. The moment I stepped inside the first time, I received a cockpit branding iron. My base was literally next door, so it wasn’t necessary, but I’d had Well Done burn it onto my shoulder, next to the defunct Charnel brand.
When I first put Moritasgus under direct control, I had trouble adjusting to his quadruped form. My brain rebelled at the idea of my physical body changing in such an odd fashion.
That was nothing compared to putting the Shrill under direct control. Nothing.
I sat into the chair and hit Direct Control.
Warning: Direct Control of Guardian Shrill is not recommended using this build. Use at your own risk.
“That’s ominous,” I muttered before hitting Confirm.
I lasted about five seconds before I blacked out. I’d thought the game crashed. I hit direct control, and I had the sensation that I was being probed by hundreds of appendages. It was like the amplification ceremony, but instead of everything being split into two, every inch of my body was split into a thousand raw pieces. Visual cues came from all directions. My entire form was covered inside and out by taste buds. My human brain simply couldn’t deconstruct all the inputs. I felt like I was spinning, falling, vomiting, choking, shitting, bleeding, and screaming all at once. And then suddenly everything went black. I awakened a minute later, ejected from direct control and vomiting on the floor.
I growled, angry at myself. I pulled myself back into the chair and tried again. And again.
It took almost two whole days to train myself to feel and control all my individual tentacles. Then to learn how to focus on individual eyes while monitoring the input from all the others. And finally, how to control my shape and move. I could feel my brain adjusting, learning to accommodate the new inputs.
From there, I learned to fight. Clara fought by my side, sometimes using Avvinik, sometimes using the Opera. The salamander could take significantly more damage than the panther. Plus it could breathe fire. But Avvinik was clearly the superior guardian. The sleek, black panther was the fastest of all the kaiju, and he could leap a mile at a time, soaring through the air as if he was a rocket. He had a penetrating special claw attack that would sheer through anything biological.
Clara and I swapped brands. I received a brand to her base within Avvinik, a brand to the West Air Sac of the Opera, and she received one to my home base, along with the brand to the oblation chamber within Moritasgus.
The last part of my Shrill training was learning to deal with my own three unusual special attacks.
The first attack was called Xura. I could cast it once every five minutes.
After using it multiple times, I still wasn’t 100% clear on what it actually did. It was some sort of charm attack over a wide area. The first time I tried it was on a horde of zippers who were attempting to swarm up my side to burrow and kill me from the inside. I cast Xura, and they all stopped their attack. Then they just sort of turned around and wandered off. Some of them sat in the grass and stared off into the sky. I didn’t have time to see what they did next or how long it lasted before the Opera burned them to a crisp. I tried the spell again, this time on a group of spider demons called venomites. That time, half the spiders rolled over onto their backs and the other half proceed to fuck and then devour them.
The next special attack was a little more straightforward. I could only cast once every five hours. It was called Hypnos. It knocked everything out. It was a massively powerful spell with a wide area of effect. The problem was it also affected Avvinik and any other good guys in the area, so I had to be careful with it. Also, it didn’t appear to work on flying creatures. Clara, it turned out, was immune to the spell. She said the guardian whimpered like a scared kitten while he was out. It only worked for about two minutes, but in a tight spot, that would be a huge advantage.
The Shrill’s fatal attack was called Shoggoth. Clara and I set aside an afternoon to figure out what it did.
If a guardian died while you were in direct control, you got kicked to your respawn. If it died while under managed control or if you were just bouncing around inside, you stayed put, which could be just as dangerous depending on how the guardian died. You had twenty minutes to abandon ship before the guardian teleported back to his own regeneration spot.
With Moritasgus’s fatal attack, the badger’s inside-out special attack killed him before I could even see what was really going on. So I had Clara post up a half-mile away, observing from a hilltop inside of Avvinik while I tried this for the first time, just in case I couldn’t see what was happening. I moved my own regen back to Medina as I was afraid whatever it wa
s, it would end up killing me.
When I cast it to see what it did, it came with two warnings, not just the usual Are You Sure?
The second warning was odd, popping up in a type of message box I had never seen before. Even the voice that read the warning was different than the usual system narrator.
Warning: FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY. Casting Shoggoth while under Direct Control has been found to have serious, detrimental, and psychological side effects to employees in early alpha testing of Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. The ability to initiate this special attack has been removed from the commercial release of Kaiju: Battlefield Surgeon. However, it appears this developmental build of the game has reinitiated the ability for players to cast while under direct control. IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED YOU DO NOT PROCEED. DO SO AT YOUR OWN PERIL. EMPLOYEES OF SIGMA TAU VR, INC ARE NOT PERMITTED TO PROCEED.
I couldn’t just wave the warning away. I had to check a box saying I UNDERSTAND THE DANGERS.
“Yeah,” I said, backing off. “We’re not going to try that today.” I switched over to managed control. The seat eased back up while the joystick rose into the room. The video windows flickered to life.
Managed control was odd, much more difficult to use than direct control. The nuances required to control individual tentacles were lost here. I pushed the stick, attempting to lead the kaiju to the top of the hill. He didn’t respond. While Moritasgus was sluggish, this was downright petulant. I pushed the stick again, and he jerked forward.
Kaiju- Battlefield Surgeon Page 42