The Blood Groove (Purgatory Wars Book 4)

by Dragon Cobolt

  “So,” Trasik said. “How big should her tits be?”

  He reached into the vat. The manipulator gloves created a glowing blue field that let him grab up great, big hunks of the ‘clay’ and slap them down onto the hanging operating table that was lowered from the ceiling once the soul had been checked and cleared.

  “I’m not even going to dignify that question with an answer,” Lanisbe said, reaching across the operating table to grab a circle cutter. He frowned, then moved around, so that he could get to the tools easier.

  Trasik worked quickly. He slapped the clay from the cart to table – throwing it down with a series of loud, wet, smacking noises. He created the outline of a human body once the mass was there – using the manipulator field generators set into his fingertips and palms to shape the clay with his will. The material rippled, flowed. Breasts formed, tipped with colorless nipples.

  “Come on, we need to strategize here.” Trasik grinned up at his coworker. By this point, the joyous relief that the hardest part of the process – despite Lanisbe's words earlier – had faded to background radiation and he could focus on what really brought his life true pleasure.

  Annoying Lanisbe.

  “Three girls, two boys, that's what Autarch Greyling wants, yes?” Trasik sculpted hips. Ample hips. Hips you could sink your fingers into and feel them squish slightly. His fingers darted forward and he drew a thin slit between her legs, making tiny motions. Tiny corrections. When his palm slipped away, the petal that sat between the half-finished constructs legs bore more in common with deviant artwork than the imperfect world of flesh and lust that humans walked through.

  “The Autarch wants a front line combatant, by the dead gods,” Lanisbe said, watching with undisguised disgust. “Not a walking fuck toy.”

  “Boys age sixteen to eighteen are showing a marked lack of interest in our Champions. And why is this? Because they’re a bunch of boring dudes. Old dudes. The youngest, sexiest Champion currently fighting for Korvosa is Loco. And he's old enough to be screwing her past life!” Trasik pointed down at the featureless face underneath him. He shook his head. “And that's not even getting into the downturn in erotica sales. Half the military budget is supported by that.”

  Lanisbe managed to give his companion a scathing look, despite the fact he had just finished pulling on a face-concealing work mask.

  Trasik continued, impervious to the censorious glare. “Girls can look up to her, but we want straight boys to be requisitioning her merchandise at the gift dispensaries, having her posters on the wall, yanking their-“

  “Stop! Stop... strategizing! For my sanity, if for nothing else.” Lanisbe shook his head – and missed Trasik's triumphant little smirk. He pulled out a beamcutter and aimed it at one of the arms that Trasik had so carefully formed He sliced into the skin, opening up what could be called muscle if it were not unfeeling clay. Once he was sure there was enough room for what he was going to do, he stepped away from the operating table and moved to the conveyor belt that ran alongside the workshop.

  Lanisbe picked up the speaking crystal. “This is Engineer Lanisbe. We're ready for the augments. Repeat, we are ready for the augments.”

  A low, droning horn buzzed through the walls.

  Throughout the manufacturing temple, there were a full three hundred and thirty three engineering teams. Most of them worked in larger chambers than the cramped, two person operating theater shared by Lanisbe and Trasik – they worked in vast arrays, bent low over conveyor belts, their fingers working a single component here, a single fraction of a part there. Each piece moved from station to station, gaining in complexity and expense as new materials and more skilled laborers were put to work. The parts became pieces, the pieces became components, and then fashioned into augmentations.

  In another time, in another nation, this frenzied activity could be spread over months, or years.

  In Korvosa – where every engineer and technician and menial working here was another one not working to build airships or crossbows or suits of armor – Champions had to be built quickly, so that they could be put to work before Korvosa's many enemies noticed the drop in production and could take advantage.

  And all those augmentations and implants were channeled to a single point, to a single operating theater, and to two engineers who worked there, together, despite the fact they couldn't stand one another, because at the end of the day, they were the best at their jobs.

  “Five-Fold Muscular Enhancement?” Lanisbe asked, looking down at the unfinished Champion.

  Trasik, the hardest part of his duty done, picked up a crystal sheaf. He tapped the side of it to unroll the dozens of knotted smart threads that made up the compuquipu. He used his finger – still buzzing with the energies he had used to shape the clay – to check one of the listed implants off. The compuquipu’s knots shifted, to show the record was being finalized, then stored in the Imperial Bureaucracy knowledge vaults.

  “Check,” Trasik said.

  Lanisbe used a scalpel to cut into the clay chest. Six baubles, each one showing an image within: a young man or woman, flying through the air as if a bird or dragon.

  “Boundless Wings Dream Stabilization Unit?”

  “Check.”

  The head was opened and opals were placed where the eyes would be, then capped with a sophisticated array of micro-lenses shrouded by clockwork and contained within a small hemisphere of tinted bronze. Once the eye was settled, Lanisbe carefully painted blue irises and whites on them. It made humans less uncomfortable. He tapped the back of the paintbrush to activate the intelligence worked into the paint – and the eyes gained shades and glistening reflectiveness. Even without a soul, there was an amazing liveliness in them.

  “Thaumographic Spirit Sight Eyes?” Trasik asked. “Or are you too busy admiring your own handiwork to actually install them?”

  Lanisbe glared at him. “Flip her over,” he said, his voice sour.

  Trasik laughed, reaching out and activating the table’s mechanism. A grating closed around the clay, holding it into place. Lanisbe looked down at the half-finished Champion for a few moments, his brow furrowed in thought. Trasik, holding the compu-quipu to his shoulder, walked over and elbowed Lanisbe in the side, grinning.

  “Sooo,” he said. “You're admiring her butt, aren't you?”

  “You have the mind of a soul-sick twelve year old,” Lanisbe said, distractedly. “They want flight, right?”

  “Yess-”

  “I just realized how we can do the Angel Transhuman Implantation without wings,” Lanisbe said.

  “They want wings, Lanny,” Trasik said.

  Lanisbe looked at Trasik. “Name a single time in history that the Army ever wanted to waste immense amounts of magical materials, Trasik.” He spoke the other engineer's name with exaggerated focus.

  “Is that a trick question?” Trasik asked.

  Lanisbe shook his head. “No. Hand me that fabrication unit.”

  “Fab-units can't do augments, Lanny,” Trasik said. “It needs to be actually made by hand – the reality matrix will just fall apart!”

  “Trasik?” Lanisbe looked up from his work. “Shut up.”

  Trasik frowned. Then, quietly, he lifted up his hands – as if to say: Well, I wash my hands of this.

  Besides, he thought. I can always sell him out to Intelisec. Then he goes into a penal battalion and I don't. Win win!

  Lanisbe worked quickly – taking apart the two sets of wings that the other engineers had sent. He wired components into the Champion's back, attached gemstone focusing emitters onto her shoulder blades, added secondary emitters on her wrists, on the base of her feet. Once he was done, she looked as if she had been given a few sets of gaudy pieces of jewelry, and half the materials used on the wings was piled in the corner of the room near the recycling chute. Trasik opened his mouth to speak. Lanisbe picked up a mana-battery, touched it to an exposed contact point, and the unfinished mass of clay and augmentations floated up and off the tab
le, hovering in space. He drew the mana-battery back and the Champion floated gently back to settle onto the table.

  Lanisbe looked smug

  “Angel Transhuman Implantation... check,” Trasik said, sounding impressed despite himself.

  Lanisbe picked up the next augmentation that rolled down the conveyor belt as Trasik kicked the magical materials down the recycling chute. Doing even basic, back of the envelope math, Trasik knew that Lanisbe had just saved Korvosa the cost of almost a sixth of a Champion. He shook his head and tried to not feel impressed. He was too invested in disliking the officious prick.

  “And that's the mana-cannon,” Lanisbe said, pointedly. “Ahem. Mana-Cannon. Ahem.”

  “Implanted Forearm Mana-Cannon, check!” Trasik said, grumpily ticking it off. He shook his head. “Halfway done.” He sighed, then slapped one clay buttock. He grinned at Lanisbe and saw the clear look of distaste in the other man's eyes.

  Now this? Trasik thought. This is the best damn job in Korvosa.

  When the last implant was placed and the final prayers were said, the time came for the most difficult and yet most effortless part of the entire procedure. Trasik picked up the tweezers. Lanisbe opened up the scanner's containment unit. He dragged the containment unit to the table – then worked some controls. The hanging table canted to a forty five degree angle, so that the Champion's head and the containment unit were almost at the same height.

  Trasik breathed in, then out, then tugged his gas mask into place. His tweezers glinted, reaching into the sustenance field, grasping onto the diamond. Inside the diamond were the shards of memory: the man, the woman, the teenager.

  The hero: fighting to protect people from unjust laws with the law, not by disregarding it.

  The hero: standing between the crowd and death – loyalty to the state and to the people exemplified.

  The hero: a teenage warrior, falling in love with a man she should hate, her loyalty to the Korvosian cause clear.

  This soul had reincarnated hundreds of times, but a larger than average number of those lifetimes had been heroic and skillful. Knowledge of law and bureaucracy, burned into her every memory. A master of organization and public speaking.

  A peerless swordswoman and warrior.

  It was the most precious thing in the room and, right now, it was as fragile as a spider web. A single moment of indecision, of lack of focus, could rip the component soul from the diamond, scattering the memories throughout the Sunder and dragging the soul into the Eye – the swirling storm of souls around which the whole of the Sunder turned. Once in the Eye, a heroic soul would have to live another lifetime, and countless man hours of work, ton lots of magical materials, incalculable amounts of mana, all of it would be wasted.

  Along with it Trasik and Lanisbe's lives. Imperial Korvosa – and the Intelisec Commissariat – had no forgiveness. No mercy.

  That fact never could get far from his thoughts, no matter how much he wished it would.

  Trasik lowered the tweezers and, his rubber hands shaking slightly with nerves, he eased them open.

  The diamond landed on the forehead. Clay opened of its own accord and sealed around it. Then the engineers stepped backwards as the workshop’s final machines came to eager life. Klaxons wailed throughout the entire capitol city, telling all to rush to their living tapestries, to their crystalline projectors. At factories, shifts were ended early. At the barracks, recruits and veterans stood side by side, in uniform, their eyes glued to moving images. All across the city – and soon, all across Korvosa - every eye was watching the clay figure.

  The machinery grabbed it under the arms and lifted it up, carrying it through a chute in the ceiling to the next room over. This room was surrounded by cold iron with soulcidian backing, preventing any mana from escaping. If a human stepped into the room, it was an even toss as to which killed them first: mana burn or frostbite. Mana was only liquid in the deepest cold, the cold only found in the deepest Sunder or in a hardened labratoria.

  The clay body was lowered, inch by inch, into the mana.

  Eyes flashed open and the body twitched, writhed. The back arched and the final characteristics formed: Red hair, short cropped and jagged – like crystals. Clay turned into blue skin, contrasting with the hair. Her eyes remained the same color, but now they glowed with real life and memories. The gemstones mounted along her back and her wrists glowed and the tank shuddered as she created a bubble of counter-gravitic energies around her form. Her back arched and she cried out – the wordless first sound of a being given life.

  Was it as pleasurable as it sounded?

  The last bits of detail formed – the dark blue of her pussy and her nipples. She was hairless down there, he noticed. Good, there was nothing quite as difficult as trying to get a Champion to shave when a Champion didn't want to shave.

  Her eyes closed and she stretched her arms to either side of her, her toes wiggling as she flexed herself, taking delight in the movement. The scanner dinged softly.

  “We’re getting a designation!” Trasik grinned, his eyes bouncing from the view of the vat and to the display on the scanner, which had fully synchronized with the internal computation of the Champion. Glyphs in Korvosian flickered across the screen. “She thinks of herself as Vengeful Crystal Hawk 45C!”

  Lanisbe nodded.

  That was it. Just a single, simple nod.

  In the vat, Vengeful Crystalline Hawk 45C finished stretching, wiggled her toes again, then grinned.

  “I'm so fucking glad that you guys finally built me,” she said, rubbing a single knuckle along her chest. “But I guess it took a while to get the shit you needed together, right?” She nodded, swaying slightly on the harness that still suspended her in the room. She yawned, slowly, covering her mouth with her hand. “So, uh,” she asked once she was finished, “Are we still at war with Korvosa?”

  Lanisbe and Trasik blinked.

  “Guys?” Vengeful Crystalline Hawk 45C asked. “I'm, uh, looking forward to kicking ass for the Republic.”

  Silence.

  “...guys?”

  Silence.

  “Is the fucking mic on or what?”

  Lanisbe and Trasik were gone.

  They didn't get caught until they reached the border. But by then, it was far too late.

  Cadet by Dragon Cobolt, the first book of the Worldshard trilogy, will be released in early 2018.

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