Worm

by John Mccrae Wildbow

  “The dose.”

  I tore my eyes away from the scene. The matchbox was beeping, but it wasn’t quite the frantic beep I’d heard when mine was going off.

  “The dog’s physiology, it might read as too healthy,” I said.

  “He’s lost half his blood,” she said, her expression grim. “He’s not even moving now.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If we get the vials from inside, maybe we can manually apply it?”

  “Mm,” Rachel grunted.

  King of Cup’s screams reached a fever pitch. I turned to look, wincing.

  “Hurry,” I said. “I need to get in there.”

  “And do what?”

  Do what? I didn’t know.

  “S-”

  All at once, the chaos was replaced by stillness.

  It wasn’t a typical silence. Typical silence would have left my ears ringing with the sudden shift from noise to an utter lack thereof.

  Wasn’t a typical stillness. If it was, I would have felt my heartbeat.

  My senses had been replaced.

  I watched as two massive beings made their way through the void.

  One was familiar to me, in a dim way I couldn’t articulate.

  Not that I could think, really. I experienced, I took things in, and I understood it.

  They were flesh and they weren’t flesh. Something I couldn’t parse, given my frame of reference. I could understand how they moved, and I knew it was because of the senses I was using, senses that allowed me to be aware of these things, to grasp them in terms of how they slid between realities.

  I focused on the familiar one, and compared it to its kin.

  It was shucking away fragments of itself, discarding them. It kept select ones. Abilities focused on violence, on defense. On mobility and battle and any number of other things.

  It exercised a variety of the fragments. It was taking over for another role, a role that the partner wasn’t fulfilling.

  The partner was busy, I noted, sending broadcasts. Messages, to something distant.

  But I couldn’t interpret the partner in the same kind of depth I could interpret the more familiar one.

  I turned my attention to it. Saw what it saw. Images of the future. I was connected somehow to every part of the being, and I was aware of everything they were aware of. I had only to look.

  It looked for a world.

  It found the world it was looking for.

  It looked for a particular variation of that world, and it found it.

  And it looked further. It viewed itself and its partner on that world. The possible forms they could take, the end results.

  It looked beyond that, to possible rebellions.

  In the midst of that, in the middle of a trillion images that passed through my awareness in a single instant, over an indeterminate span of travel and viewing, one scene was acutely familiar.

  The entity as a golden man.

  Capes littering the surface around him, every single one of them unconscious, dead, bleeding, crushed, or burned. He was untouched, coated only in their remains, thick blood and other, pulpier substances dripping and dropping from his fingers in strings.

  He viewed the scene, as he viewed all of the scenes, through the senses of the fragments that had gone ahead, of fragments that had arrived after he had. They were embedded in hosts, which meant he viewed things through the eyes of the host, and through the abilities the hosts expressed.

  I willed for it to continue, to go deeper, to provide more details. But things moved along. If anything, my efforts dashed the scene from the ongoing stream of sensory inputs. Instead, I got a glimpse the futures one step further. Variations.

  Every one of them, futures where the entity had survived. Futures where the hosts hadn’t fought back. Futures where they had fought back and inevitably lost. He was plotting a course to a particular destination in time and causality, just as he’d plotted a course to Earth. There were criteria, and in each of the visions, things occurred.

  These visions were blocked from any particular attention. Hidden away by some treatment of the fragments, treatment of the entity’s own recollections, so the visions couldn’t be used against it.

  But I could see the essential elements.

  He would live, because he’d given himself enough power. With the criteria he had set, there was no way for the hosts to win, unless he deviated. With the granted powers, there was no way for them to do any meaningful harm to him. The entity could see the permutations, the ways they moved and interacted. He called on a particular fragment, yet to be released in search of a host, and-

  Familiar. A familiar presence.

  -he could get an understanding of the hosts, filling in blanks that the future-sight and his own mind couldn’t. See how they moved, how they cooperated, how they didn’t cooperate. He could see the strategies they could possibly employ, the strategies they couldn’t.

  Again, these were censored, blocked in this three-dimensional, xenosensory, interactive memory.

  But he could see, and he knew they would fail, as much by their own hand as by his. He could see how all paths he had considered led to a fulfillment of his mission, his eventual meeting with his partner, in their other forms. He could see how he wins in every circumstance where he has to fight. Countless paths to victory. He would spend the rest of the journey to this planet in picking one, was already setting things up so that paths to defeat would no longer be possible.

  We lose.

  It was my thought, not the entity’s.

  The thought stuttered, distorted. Repeated over and over so fast it seemed to become only a jumble of sounds.

  Another repetition, where each syllable seemed to take days to form.

  I opened my eyes, and I saw the scene from the vision. Scion standing in the middle of the settlement, blood and brains dripping from his hand.

  The two words continued, as if in the background, distorted as I turned my head.

  It was one of the capes that had arrived with Crane. He was doing it, distorting the memory.

  Making it so the memory wouldn’t fade.

  Let me forget, I thought. I don’t want to know this. Let me be ignorant, fight to the end.

  Scion stood, waiting patiently. No point tearing us to pieces when we weren’t aware enough for it to matter.

  I looked at him, and I saw the entity from my memory. I saw the vast thing he was, and I knew that we were specks to him. He’d held back when he’d used the beam to slice through legs, when he used mere physical force to crush Queen of Sword’s skull. He’d held back, in a fashion, when he’d obliterated the United Kingdom of Earth Bet.

  King of Cups howled wordlessly, using his power, and the phantom limbs started emerging from every surface around us.

  My back arched as one thrust itself free from my chest. A tentacle.

  A claw emerged from the ground by my neck.

  Every surface in sight, marked with the ebon-black limbs, faces, even the upper bodies of indistinct lifeforms. Some humanoid, some very not. From horizon to horizon, the landscape turned dark as phantom images peppered it, growing denser with every passing second.

  With none of the care of the time that he’d taken with Queen of Swords, Scion crushed King of Cup’s skull.

  The phantom images crumbled into black ash.

  “No,” Rachel said. “Fuck it. Fuck him.”

  “Rachel?” I mumbled.

  I turned my head, felt my head swim with the aftermath of the vision, or the memory-retention power, and I saw the matchbox, the contents spilled. The ground beneath was darker. Dirt soaked with the fluid.

  “Was trying to open it when the vision hit,” Rachel said.

  The Simurgh screamed. Scion gave her his full attention.

  She used her power, parting the sea of fallen, reeling capes with her telekinesis. Capes between her and Scion were tossed aside, and capes behind Scion were dismissed in the same way. I could see people bounce off the ground, limbs be
nding in awkward, painful ways as they landed.

  Bugs, to be swatted aside when they got in the way.

  Then she fired the guns. Hers and Kid Win’s.

  The shotgun approach. Cover as wide an area as possible, cover as many bases as possible, in the hopes that something hits.

  I covered my eyes, turning my head. When that wasn’t enough, I covered my eyes with my arm.

  There was little sound, but there was a horrific vibration, something that made me worry my insides were turning to jelly.

  When I could see again, Scion was gone.

  But he wasn’t defeated. I knew that much.

  The Simurgh, moving with a deliberate assurance, began reloading each of the guns. Extraneous pieces of the halo served as battery packs, as ammunition.

  Scion passed through the portal behind her. As if in slow motion, I could see her folding herself forward, her wings wrapping around her body. Preparing for the attack that was about to come.

  He hit her, and he sent her flying through the crowd. Capes were turned into bloody smears as she collided with them, and the Simurgh was driven to the very far edge of the settlement, to the beaches at the edge of the bay. The countless guns were pulverized.

  Almost casually, Scion created a beam that speared through the center of the hill Vista had made, and the hill crumbled, the effect collapsing inconsistently, the hill and everyone on it falling violently to the ground below.

  “Tattletale,” I said.

  “Go,” Rachel said.

  I looked at her, at Bastard, who barely seemed to be breathing anymore. In the distance, Scion followed up his attack on the Simurgh. She continued to focus on defending herself, raising sand in false Simurgh decoys, manipulating water, all to misdirect, as she kept her wings folded around her like a shell.

  “Go,” she said. “Help Tattletale.”

  There was something in her voice. Something that suggested she did care after all. Imp’s ribbing aside, Rachel did value Tattletale on some level.

  I tried to stand, and felt the strength of the congealed blood that bound me to the cloth, which was in turn bound to Bastard’s foreleg stumps. My swarm and a bit of pulling on my part broke the connection. I stood, and my leg throbbed where I’d dropped a little too quickly to the ground, earlier. Flight was easier and faster.

  I was halfway to Tattletale when I sensed Rachel moving. Clawing at the dirt with her fingers, cramming it into Bastard’s mouth, almost climbing into his mouth as she shoved dirt down his throat.

  I sensed him react, choking, making noises far too feeble for such a great beast. Rachel had to heave herself free to avoid being in the way as he reflexively slammed his jaws shut, coughing and hacking.

  She grabbed handfuls of the dirt and smeared it on the stumps of his wounds, instead.

  Glaistig Uaine deemed it her moment to descend. I moved bugs to her so I’d know what was going on as I landed, gently, near the ones who’d been on the hill.

  Kid Win held Vista, and Tattletale had landed on her back near the portal’s base. Crane and her cronies stood by, impassive.

  “My guns didn’t do anything,” Kid Win said.

  “You okay?” I asked Tattletale.

  “Mostly. Soil was soft as I landed, but… still a drop,” she said.

  “You’re fine,” Crane said. Her tone made it sound like something that would be true if she said it with enough conviction.

  “That vision…” Tattletale said.

  “Anything useful?” I asked.

  “If it was useful, he would have censored it,” she said.

  I looked at Crane. “Did you plan that? Why bring that guy?”

  “Teacher asked me to bring him,” she said. “That is not one of mine.”

  Teacher.

  So many plays. So many big players.

  I felt a welling anger, frustration, a note of hopelessness I hadn’t felt before.

  Glaistig Uaine had Gavel as a spirit, and was pounding at Scion, with little effect.

  “He adapts,” Tattletale said. “I was saying it on the phone. He just needs a reminder about which passenger we’ve got, and then he adjusts some internal frequency, and he adapts. Anything we can throw at him, he knows how to cancel out.”

  Glaistig Uaine changed up. Three spirits.

  Eidolon was one of them.

  “So we need to beat him with one shot,” I said.

  “Not doable,” she said.

  “Because we aren’t hurting him,” I spoke my thoughts aloud. We haven’t touched him.

  “We’re hurting him,” she said. “Kind of like how people hurt Gavel. He’s… he’s got a defense, not making him invincible, but making him a living portal. So you hurt him, and faster than you can do anything, he just swaps out the damaged material for material from… this bottomless well.”

  A well?

  I could see Lung finding his feet. As large as Leviathan, four wings, four hands, two digitigrade feet. King of Cup’s power had faded, but regeneration had made up for it. Lung was intact, naked, massive, monstrous and bristling with layers upon layers of silver scales.

  He joined the fray, supporting Glaistig Uaine as she took to the air, flying through the crowd to access the wounded and dying.

  I could see Eidolon’s shadow briefly take hold of the injured, then toss them aside. Glaistig Uaine, for her part, accessed the dead.

  The other two spirits attacked Scion. Here and there, attacks made him react.

  But, as Tattletale had said, no attack was as effective on subsequent iterations.

  “We could change it up,” Tattletale said. “hit him with enough effects in a way he can’t predict.”

  “So why don’t we?” I asked.

  “Just look,” Tattletale said.

  Two hundred capes, still recovering. Some, I suspected, playing dead, morale crushed.

  They’d seen Scion’s true body. They’d seen what I’d suspected, that we were truly dwarfed in scale. Their morale was crushed.

  The ones who still fought were the monsters, the lunatics.

  King of Cup’s power began to recur, massive arms from ten different species, some not from Earth, lunged out of the ground, holding Scion.

  Glaistig Uaine. She had Queen of Swords too, was drawing diagrams between capes on the ground and Eidolon, a narrow, tall image of glowing lines, like a steeple.

  The Faerie Queen looked at the Simurgh, and her spirits turned their heads at the same time. Watching, wanting some kind of action or follow-through. Expectant.

  The Simurgh held one gun. A single weapon she’d salvaged and sheltered with her body and wings in the instants before Scion had attacked her.

  “Silver bullet?” Tattletale asked.

  “It’s an air gun,” Kid Win said. “Useless.”

  “Maybe there’s another use for it,” Tattletale said. “The Simurgh’s smart.”

  The Simurgh fired the gun.

  Scion’s hair blew in the resulting gust of wind.

  He blasted the Simurgh, sending her into the bay.

  While Scion’s back was turned, Lung struck. Brute force coupled with more brute force. Strength, size, and flames that melted the sand on contact. Scion was plunged into the molten morass, was subsequently doused in water that steamed in the heat of Lung’s flame.

  More like plasma than flame, something else entirely. Heat, distilled. The result was more like Sundancer’s power than anything.

  Golden light seared Lung’s claws, but regeneration and a raw durability that exceeded all reasonable limits gave him the ability to hold on, to keep Scion beneath the growing pool of molten sand.

  The light intensified, and Lung’s flames swelled at the same time, as if reactive.

  The Endbringer-esque Lung fell, as if he had been pulled down, and Scion rose from beneath.

  Capes who had recovered opened fire. Glaistig Uaine used Queen of Sword’s abilities, created more bindings with the King of Cups.

  Crane the Harmonious, as if she’d bee
n waiting for a moment, used her own power. A sphere, like Sundancer’s, only it was a distortion, like a glass bead that made things look upside down when you looked through it.

  It moved forward until it was between the defending capes and Scion.

  Once the bead was in place, every bullet hit. Every power.

  Scion hit the ground, and Lung was on him in an instant, like a cat on a mouse. It took Scion seconds to fight his way free, to strike Lung aside.

  The bead moved, and more shots struck their target.

  I watched, very still, as the guns that had been torn to smithereens were reassembled. The Simurgh was prone, but she used her telekinesis, reaching a distance away.

  Scion’s beam lanced through Crane. Too fast to dodge. It passed within ten feet of me, hit Kid Win, hit the portal.

  I could hear a structure collapsing on the far end of the portal.

  Crane dropped like a puppet with the strings cut. Something in Kid Win’s suit detonated, and he tipped over, landing hard.

  Vista rushed to his side, her expression hard. No anguish, no tears, none of the emotion I’d have expected her to show.

  It was almost scary.

  Bastard, in the distance, rose to his feet.

  He’d swelled in size. Was still growing. Rachel remained where she’d been, kneeling in a pile of his blood, as he tore forwards.

  Crashed into Lung, making a sound more like an extended grunt than a growl or a roar.

  Lung practically picked up the dog, throwing it at Scion.

  It wasn’t additive growth. I could see how the dog swelled. Lab Rat’s power had to tap into something to create the flesh. Had used my blood and bone. Except it was tapping into the same things that Rachel’s power provided. Mass.

  It was like a limiter had been removed altogether. The can of worms cracked open. Muscle, rippling. Claw. Horn and bone. Calcified flesh. Like water from a waterfall, tendrils and body parts raining down from the lump that clung, snarling from many different mouths, to Scion. All one connected mass, incoherent.

  Scion began burning through the flesh, making headway against the growing monstrosity. Glaistig Uaine shot him with Queen of Sword’s ability yet again.

  They were driving him away from the settlement, and that allowed some capes to use powers they’d been unable to. Miss Militia stepped up to the plate, a cape flanking her.