The Sentient Corruption (The Sentient Trilogy Book 3)

by Ian Williams

  “Graham,” the older of the voices said to him. “He means how our mind was inside the Sentient world, separate from our body. He knows we were there.”

  “How did you know I was in the Sentient world?” Graham asked suddenly.

  Isaac stopped mid-sentence to answer him. “You fought against my forces. I see everything they do. I saw you with those Sentient freaks, and watched you protecting them from me. You succeeded in that endeavour, for a while at least.”

  “For a while? What did you do? Tell me what you’ve done.” Graham bounced up the single step to be right next to Isaac, so close that he could see the flicker of the holographic image standing there before him.

  “Oh, you mean what did I do to your Sentient friends. You call one of them Luke, don’t you? Pathetic! They are not pets, Graham.”

  “Tell me what you’ve done with them.”

  “No, no, no. That isn’t how this goes. You’ll have to see for yourself.” Isaac stood straight and raised his chin up high. “And that is where we must end it for now. It is time you made a decision.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Graham,” Phoenix told him.

  “Please, hush, this is important.” Isaac stepped around Graham to the other side of the table, where he sat. “Now, when I return to the Sentient world, you will have a choice. You can either leave this place and try to survive the rest of the war, with your family by your side. Or you can follow me and give up any chance you have of seeing them again.

  “I can tell you that, even after my warning, your past decisions have tended toward following me, with an overwhelming probability of seventy-eight percent that you will again. Of course, that will have changed now that I have told you all of this.”

  Graham already knew which it was going to be. Despite how torn he really felt inside, he had only one option to go with; he was going to fight until his last breath. “I won’t let you get away this time,” he said.

  “So, my predictions are proven correct yet again. Just know this, Graham Denehey, that ninety-nine percent of the time you die when you enter the Sentient world after me.” Isaac stood and bowed as he finished. “And with that I shall bid you all a fond farewell. The next time I see you, Graham, it will be the last.”

  Isaac’s image faded away to leave the room in complete silence. Everyone stood motionless and staring blankly ahead in shock. Their first encounter with Isaac in over a year and a half had ended much quicker than any of them expected. He had arrived out of nowhere, gone on to tell them their thoughts and explained their every option, then left just as quickly.

  “You’re not really considering going after him, are you?” Conrad asked.

  Graham could only stare at the spot where Isaac had been for the time being. An angry storm of vitriol swirled within his troubled mind. Not only was he raging about what he had seen, but every other voice inside his head was too. It quickly became too much for his mind to sieve through. All of the noise built into one enormous screaming match, like an entire stadium of people were yelling at the top of their voices, all contained within his skull.

  After a while it was all he could hear. Even Phoenix seemingly shouting straight at him could not break through it all. She grabbed his shoulders and began to shake him roughly into responding. In the end, all he could do to stop his head from exploding was to join in with the other voices in his head.

  He yelled out repeatedly until the other sounds began to calm down again. There had to be thousands of voices in there now, so many more than he knew how to cope with. Yet each and every one of them understood that their angry cries had to stop. It had taken the contents of Graham’s lungs to bring them to an end, with one massive boom of his own voice.

  “What’s wrong? Graham. Please, talk to me,” Phoenix continued to plead with him. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s the voices, they’re too much, I can’t…” His voice stuttered as the ordeal got the better of him. In that moment he realised he was still following Isaac’s predictions, and it made him descend further into his sudden pit of despair. He had almost fallen apart in exactly the way Isaac had said.

  “We should go,” Conrad said.

  “I can’t do that.” Graham objected. “My family is waiting for me. They’re in the path of Isaac’s army now.”

  “You can’t get out of the city while this is going on. What else can we do now, but hide?”

  “I can finish this tonight, once and for all.” Graham stood straight, his back forming a solid line and his fists clenched tight. “Hook me up, I’m going after Isaac.”

  Phoenix picked up two of the cables and again studied the needle-like ends. She checked both looked the same and then set about offering one to Graham. The other she kept in her hand.

  “I only need one,” Graham said.

  Phoenix looked nervously toward him. “The other is for me.”

  “What? No way, you can’t. Rhys would never agree to that.”

  “If you two are going, then so am I,” Conrad said, picking up a wire of his own. “I’m too old to hide from anyone these days.”

  “If Isaac knows we’re going to do this then it means it’s easy to figure out.” Phoenix raised the wire up to the back of her head and held it there, waiting for anything to happen. To everyone’s surprise the three wires went for the back of her head like three tiny pissed off snakes. The needles pierced the base of her skull and she immediately fell silent, her eyes open wide and staring at nothing.

  “Shit.” Conrad then followed her lead and did the same. He winced as the three needled ends shot out like darts and entered the back of his head too.

  Graham gave one last look to Isaac’s desk before he joined them. The world then disappeared for him the second he felt each needle puncture his skin and then continue up into his brain. A sharp pain as strong as a bullet through his head followed, but was gone almost immediately afterwards.

  All he needed to do now was open his eyes and see what was there.

  Chapter 28

  End game – part one

  When Graham finally decided it was safe to open his eyes again, he did so slowly and found a whole new world in place of the other. He had been inside the Sentient world before, but never in the part of it he now stood. He saw no darkened landscape stretching far away, or any odd pathways and strange floating doors like his previous visit contained. Instead he had arrived in an enormous central chamber, like he had stepped inside a gothic cathedral.

  Tall archways hung high above his head that appeared made of wood hundreds of years old. It was black too, as though it had all seen a fire at some point in its history. All along the ceiling were complex patterns carved into the wooden beams that only added to the atmosphere of dread surrounding him.

  He turned to see the others there too. They searched the dark spots of the ceiling for anything residing within. It was only when Graham followed a few of their gazes that he realised the walls were moving. The same patterns on the beams above repeated across these too. Up close he could see what he had missed before. It appeared a writhing mass of bodies, all crawling over each other and spying the four humans inside the room.

  “This is seriously messed up,” Phoenix said, being the first to break the silence. In here her slightly Emo appearance appeared almost at home.

  “What do you think they are?” Conrad added as he wandered close to a wall and leant toward it to see better.

  “Don’t you recognise them, Graham?” A deep demonic voice spoke to them from a black void at the furthest wall of the room. The power behind the unseen presence’s voice caused the ground to shake beneath them.

  “Isaac, is that you?” Graham called back.

  “Do you recognise them?” The voice became like a deep rumble as it echoed around the huge room.

  Graham felt a surge of fear pop into place in the centre of his mind as he considered the forms all intermingling and distorting within the wall – what had appeared a solid structure of wood a moment earlier. M
ost were featureless and only outlines of faces, with nothing to tell them apart at all. Yet the more he looked the more he expected that to change. When the first that he recognised bubbled up through the rest of the bodies he leapt back and gasped. “Oh my god. What have you done to them?” he shouted as he locked eyes with the face he had seen.

  “No,” Phoenix whispered as she too spotted a face she had seen before. “Luke. Jesus Christ.”

  Again the voice spoke to them as though it belonged to a giant hiding behind the darkness. “They are mine, now. I have defeated the last of the Sentient plague. This place belongs to me and only me. Soon the same will happen in your world too. I will not rest until every human is either dead or under my control. Those who stand against me will perish, as your friends here soon will.”

  “You bastard.” Phoenix this time raised her voice as much as she could to vent her anger.

  “That’s why I couldn’t reach Luke and the others, they were under attack too,” Graham said, speaking to himself. He then returned to speaking to the unseen form at the back of the room. “Damn you, they were safe. How did you get inside the puzzle maze?”

  “That would be down to me.”

  Everyone turned to find the person who had appeared behind them unexpectedly. The man standing there was one Graham did not know. Conrad, on the other hand, definitely knew him.

  “So it’s true, you really were working for Isaac all along,” Conrad said.

  The man gave a disturbing smile in reply.

  “Who is he, Conrad?” Graham asked.

  “My name is Stanley Cartwright. I was the Deputy Mayor, until Conrad here decided to kidnap the Mayor, and that forced my promotion. To answer your other question, Mr. Denehey, I was the one who brought down the puzzle maze, as you call it. Your Sentient friends took me in like a sick puppy and nursed me back to health. I waited until they turned their backs and then let in Isaac’s beasts. I've been informed that you’ve already seen the spiky monstrosities before, Graham. Very scary things indeed. Anyway, your friends were torn limb from limb while they begged to be spared.”

  “There were families in there, real families. You don’t know what you’ve done.”

  “We’ve won, simple as that.”

  “You haven’t won anything yet, you fuckers,” Phoenix yelled.

  “Enough!” The booming voice of Isaac silenced them all. It carried with it enough force to again rattle the foundations of the room. “Why do you still choose to come here when I have told you how it must end? Are you so consumed by hate that it has clouded your judgement? Or do you still cling to hope?”

  “I’ve fought your creatures off before and I can do it again. Or have you forgotten about the last time?” Graham returned with.

  Isaac let out a deep and throaty laugh that vibrated through the walls and the floor like a fleet of tanks rolling by. “That was against only a few. I have many more than you could ever defeat now. Perhaps you would like to see?”

  From the arches above their heads came the sound of cracking wood and splintering beams. Bits began to fall from the ceiling and land heavily onto the floor as an army of glowing creatures broke their way inside the room. They tore away the roof with their sword-like appendages, each as vicious as the next, and exposing a thunderous sky above.

  “When you have defeated my army, what will you do then? Do you hope to fight me too?” Isaac said. His question was followed by an earth-shaking thud, then another shortly after. Slowly the black void that had hidden him so far began to retreat all the way to the back of the room. Where Isaac had spoken from could now be seen fully.

  “Oh my god. We can’t fight that, Graham.” Phoenix pulled on Graham's arm to move him back.

  Sitting in a throne the size of a ten storey building was Isaac, his face as dark and devoid of colour as before. Within the Sentient world he had grown to such a scale that he appeared a giant in comparison to the others there with him. All around his bloated form came a collection of enormous Kraken-sized tentacles that flittered and swiped at the air. They appeared incomplete, like a hologram with missing pixels. “Now you see my true form. Do you still believe you have any chance against me?” he said.

  One of the glowing creatures crawled down Isaac’s rightmost tentacle, all the way to the floor, and landing with a crunch as the ground collapsed slightly beneath it. Without taking the time to even aim, Graham threw a bolt of energy from out of his fingertips that exploded the creature upon impact, sending pieces of it flying in all directions.

  “Bloody hell,” Conrad called out as a piece passed him by. “How on Earth did you do that?”

  “So,” Isaac began. “You still remember how to fight in this world.”

  Graham kept his arms spread wide apart and waving around as a warning to the rest of the creatures skulking around the area above them. “After I helped get Luke and his people to safety they taught me a few tricks. Feel free to check them out.”

  “Oh, I intend to.”

  The second Isaac finished speaking the remaining creatures leapt from their hiding spots and landed in a neat row between him and Graham’s group. Then more followed, and even more, until an entire battalion of enemies had appeared.

  “Graham, we can’t help you, we don’t have the abilities you do,” Phoenix said.

  “I’ve got this,” Graham replied before instigating a fight with the first row of creatures. He fired a volley of bolts into a few of them, instantly smashing them into glassy pieces upon the dark ground. He then took aim at the rest and dealt them all fatal blows in quick succession. The first row now lay in tatters and thousands of bits all around.

  “Impressive,” the deep voice of Isaac said from his giant throne. “You wield your anger well, Graham.”

  The second row of creatures changed their tactics and split up into separate groups. They moved rapidly as they approached Graham, not taking a single second more than they absolutely needed to reach him. After a few had been blasted to nothing but dust and grit, the rest were soon upon him.

  Graham was dealt a deep cut across his side that lit up the immediate area with bright light. He looked down at the wound and was amazed to see it glowing like the inside of a Sentient. After taking a hit, he staggered back a few steps before he regained his balance. When he spotted a group of four of the creatures racing toward him again he sent out another attack of energy bolts, bringing them all crashing to the floor.

  He had beaten only two rows of the creatures and still there were more than ten rows remaining. The deep gash in his side told him how difficult it was going to be to win. There were just too many of them to defeat. He had already taken a hit that was serious enough to bring most people to their knees.

  “Graham,” Phoenix screamed. If not for Conrad holding her back she would have run to him.

  Graham held up his hand. “Wait,” he shouted, his other hand tight against his side.

  The enemy stopped in place upon Isaac’s silent command. “What is it? Are you ready to admit defeat?”

  “Fine. You have me already. Let the others go. They don’t need to die here as well.”

  “What are you doing, Graham?” Conrad said.

  Isaac leant back in his chair. “Even in the face of certain death you humans will think of others. It is one of many weaknesses you have. No, after I have destroyed you I will do the same to them. They will be cut down by your side. I will allow you something else, however.”

  The nearest wall to Phoenix and Conrad turned from a solid piece of wood to a rippling puddle. Bodies floated up to the surface like bloated cadavers in stagnant water and then were gone. Only one remained, contained within the small waves. This last figure emerged alone, and was allowed to fall to the floor a moment later.

  “Luke, oh my god. Are you OK?” Phoenix raced over and wrapped her arms around him.

  “There,” Isaac interrupted. “Now is the time to say your goodbyes.”

  Luke was too weak to hold himself up as he spoke. “What are you
doing here? You have to leave, it isn’t safe.”

  “Don’t worry, Luke. We’re here to help.”

  “Please, you have to save the others. There are still some of us left, back at the puzzle maze.” He turned to face Isaac as he continued. “You’ve killed almost all of my people already. Please, spare the rest. We are no threat to you any longer. Just let us all leave this place.”

  “While even one of you is still alive, I will never stop. These worlds are mine now.”

  Phoenix held Luke tight in her arms.

  Seeing the two of them holding each other close, a human and a Sentient together, made Graham decide what should happen next. He had faced the same choice once before. Back at Sanctuary he had chosen to stay behind and fight, all to give his family the chance to escape. He saw the same happening again. If he stayed behind and fought them off for as long as he could, then maybe the others could get away still. “Go, now, all of you,” he said. “Save your people, Luke. Get them out of here.”

  “Thank you, Graham.”

  “You can’t take them all on by yourself, that’s crazy.” It was Conrad who shot this back at Graham first. The others were just too slow to say it before him.

  “I’ve made my mind up. Go.”

  Phoenix dragged Luke to his feet and made for an enormous door at the end of the room. As she did so she looked to Graham for the final confirmation that he was to stay. She got it, and with an expectant smile too. With reluctance, Conrad followed soon after, leaving Graham alone.

  “Well, this has been fun and all, but I really need to be getting on with things,” Stanley said. He then faded away into thin air a moment later. It was a sign that the fighting was about to intensify once again.

  Isaac then spoke. “I agree. I am growing tired of this. What do you say, Graham Denehey, shall we finish this?

  “Your move.”

  “Excellent,” Isaac growled. “Kill him now,” he then ordered of his army of glowing creatures.