There were still more than one hundred tinkertech-clad puppets in the square. And only one Cawthorne. A single Dragon suit, while the others arrived.I had taken down this model in the past. I was aware of its weaknesses and its strengths. And unlike before, this was the battlefield where it would shine.Here, faced against dozens of different Tinker specializations, each subpar when compared to what true Tinkers could create, Dragon was in her element. The top-most expert in tinkertech. The very same person that kept Teacher locked up in his prison.Dragon understood at a glance every single piece of technology that was arrayed against her. Understood that Teacher had something to do with this, and began comparing each device with what she had in her archives."Arsenal is also on his way. We're trying to get more help but Italy is refusing aid. My presence here is less than… legal."Dragon spoke through loudspeakers in the Cawthorne suit, as my communication interface was still fried. I still couldn't connect back to Weaver, but in the distance I noticed that the Blasphemies were still fighting. Winning, but not so quickly that Weaver couldn't keep up. She only had a couple of Wasps and the mechanical centipede left, but she had begun approaching the Blasphemies in hand to hand combat, using her bugs as distractions.In the ruins of the basilica, enormous structures of bronze had appeared. Water turned solid by Julius. I could hear the sound of fighting but couldn't see neither Julius nor Adriana. Or Cariddi.The puppets around me began aiming at Dragon. The suit immediately moved, weaving through the attacks even before the weapons had fired, while also carefully choosing which shots weren't necessary to dodge.Most of the puppets' attacks had no effect - stopped by specific countermeasures that Dragon had built within her suit. The Cawthorne opened its mouth and shot out a large blob of containment foam, restraining three puppets in a single hit.I had killed about half of Tisiphone's army. She quickly realized that the remaining puppets weren't a match for Dragon.All at once the puppets stopped paying attention to Dragon and instead turned to me. Weapons at the ready. They lunged for me, trying to quickly kill me before more Dragon suits could arrive.Even with my body broken and beginning to malfunction I was far from harmless. I dodged a sword aiming for my chest and grasped onto the head of one of the puppets, crushing it to a pulp, before using his own arm and sword to skewer in the face another puppet. Making sure that I did not directly handle the sword, this time. I didn't want another weapon blowing up on me.Dragon stopped in the air. I could feel her glare burning through me. Right, she didn't know."They're already dead. Braindead. Master puppets, scan their heads. Don't hold back." I explained.Dragon glanced back towards the crowd of puppets.A moment passed.Then the four deadly weapons on the Cawthorne's back began to light up. Tisiphone, for the first time since this fight had begun, used her black threads defensively, creating a dome around her puppets.The bombardment began. The dome mostly cracked and shattered under the strength of multiple explosions and bursts of fire, though some sections managed to save a handful of the puppets.A second Dragon suit joined the field, a bigger model than the Cawthorne. More like a small helicopter than a power armor. The Ladon. Mark two, I guessed. It hovered above me as its latch opened.Without hesitation I jumped in. The latch closed behind me and I instinctively relaxed. There was no cockpit or visible pilot seat inside, but it was still quite comfortable.Tisiphone lashed out at the Ladon, ordering her corpse puppets to fire at it, and sending tens of black tendrils to try and bring it down. To little effect, as the Cawthorne forced the puppets back and Ladon's natural forcefields held the metal tendrils at bay."You have some explaining to do." Dragon's voice was calmer now, but also… Warped? Strange. Back to being synthetic. Had she been wounded while I was away?"Do you have some tools here?"To the side a section of the aircraft shifted, opening and revealing what I needed. A sparse collection of tools, likely Arsenal's."Thank you." I immediately got to work. First, I opened the plating underneath my ears to fix the most immediate problem. A couple seconds later my comms were back online, and I immediately got a report on Weaver's status:Her costume reported multiple fractures and surface injuries, but no broken bones or fatal injury. What was most concerning were the damages on the mechanical centipede, and the number of lost Wasp units."Weaver, come in.""Blackwall. I can't keep up with them for much longer. Is that Dragon?"I extended a wire from my implant and plugged it to a port on the Ladon. Immediately Dragon connected to the call, this time with my permission."Dragon here. I'm sending seven armored suits stationed in non-critical locations to you. Arsenal is on his way, ETA ten minutes. It took a while to convince Silk Road.""God bless you Dragon." Julius answered into the comms. So he was still able to speak, good.Silk Road was a Mover cape that was normally set aside for Endbringer attacks. It seemed that Dragon had brought out all the stops to help me."Is anyone else coming?" Weaver asked."Italy is openly denying that anything is happening, and neither the PRT nor any other organization is pushing too much. Nobody is coming. I paid a big price to be here."As I thought of the Chief PRT Director, I pulled out a jammed implant from my neck with a bit too much strength. But with that, the hard part was done."I've sent you a file. There is everything you need to know about our situation."Dragon went quiet for a moment."Understood. Focusing on evacuation efforts. Sending one suit to aid against Cariddi and Blasphemies respectively. Keeping two suits to deal with the tinker-clad squadron and Tisiphone.""Three minutes." I updated them on my recovery time, meanwhile Dragon began displaying the surrounding battlefield on the screen within the aircraft."Everything except this communication channel is being broadcasted to the PRT overseas, be advised." Dragon explained.Weaver was down to her last Wasp and a heavily damaged Hecatoncheires. At the same time, the Blasphemies too hadn't come out unscathed: there were multiple additional burn marks on their bodies, some caused by the Burya, others by the Wasp and Hecatoncheires, and lastly some cuts that Weaver had inflicted in close combat. Even though I had specifically told her to avoid fighting the Blasphemies hand to hand. Given that she was still alive, her decision to ignore my orders had likely been the correct one.She immediately adapted to the help of the incoming Dragon suit: "I'll keep them pinned, try to hit them."The Three Blasphemies noticed the increased danger as they suddenly split up. Not fast enough, though, as the frowning Blasphemy was struck in the chest by the Burya, sending her tumbling backwards right into the maw of the incoming Dragon suit. A spray of containment foam shot out and immobilized the Blasphemy.The other two Blasphemies had fled farther away, but they too began to struggle against the living bugs and mechanical constructs. This slowed them down, giving us more room to breathe."Dragon, can you analyze Tisiphone's forcefield?"A single second passed."It's a pseudo-All or Nothing forcefield. It's extremely hard to damage, but once you make even the slightest chip then it will fall apart like glass."I nodded, then focused back onto the screens. A plan was forming in my head.The Dragon suit near Cariddi dove from the sky and tried to impale the parahuman with a long spear. It only managed to pierce his skin."Back up!" Dragon yelled to Julius and Adriana.The sides of the spears opened up, and a deadly quantity of nanothorns swarmed the air all around, shredding Cariddi. Within an instant his flesh was reduced to bone, revealing his ribcage and beating heart, but then the damage began slowing down, before fully stopping.Cariddi had increased the density of his body to the point where the nanothorns weren't able to break the molecular bonds anymore."He's like an Endbringer. The nanothorns are giving me the same data as what Arsenal got against Leviathan."But Dragon had still accomplished what she wanted to do.Unlike the Endbringers, Cariddi could not increase his density without a proportional increase in mass. And the density required to resist the nanothorns meant that he began to once again sink into the ground. To an object of that density and mass, the marble debris below him behaved like a liquid. The spear was still stuck in him, so he would continue to sink for a while."Two minutes." I called out the time left on my recovery.Tisiphone didn't just stand back and watch as Dragon turned the tide of the battlefield. No, her black metal approached the spike keeping Cariddi pinned: the threads immediately got shredded when they approached the nanothorns, but she didn't relent. The metal split into countless tiny threads, trying to find a single spot where the nanothorns were not active. It took fifteen seconds, but she eventually found one. Dragon tried to break away the black metal through firing her artillery, but Cariddi simply vaporised anything that got too close with a blast of water. The thread infiltrated the tinkertech spear and began wrecking its internals. The nanothorns stopped. Immediately another burst of water rose to the sky, shredding all the stone around Cariddi and giving him the space to climb out.But the others hadn't been idle in the meanwhile."One minute. Dragon, bring me up."Adriana had placed herself exactly above Cariddi, using her legs to shield her body from the deadly pressurized jets. The black metal in her legs was much more durable than Tisiphone's or Malacoda's, and it was the only material available to us that could resist the 6 gigapascals pressure cutters that Cariddi regularly shot out. Dragon placed a suit just behind Adriana, protected from the water blades by Adriana's legs, and began engaging her thrusters at max power to push both of them down at full speed.They crashed against Cariddi and once again drove him deep into the ground. The maneuver didn't even scratch at Cariddi's skin. That wasn't their objective.The Dragon suit opened up and Julius jumped out of it. Cariddi, for all his strengths, was still restricted to human reaction times. He tried desperately to activate his power, but he was too late:Julius placed a hand on Cariddi's chest and began transmuting his flesh to bronze. Unlike with Malacoda, Cariddi's transformation was not immediate. Julius power spread in proportion to the mass he was influencing, and Cariddi was much much denser than a normal human. With his other hand, Julius created a dense bronze sphere around him, enveloping his whole body and part of Cariddi's chest. This way Julius pinned himself to Cariddi, making sure that he wouldn't let go, and he also created a regenerating sphere of bronze that stopped Cariddi from pushing Julius away.If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.As long as Julius continued to keep contact, then he could adjust his power to the density increase in such a way that Cariddi couldn't free himself. Back in Latina, when the two first fought, Julius had made the grave mistake of underestimating Cariddi's power, leaving his side once he thought that the parahuman calamity was dead.Julius wasn't going to make that mistake again.Cariddi roared and struggled against the massive sphere of bronze that was pushing him down. He tried to drill into it with jets of water, but Julius power regenerated the bronze faster than Cariddi could cut it apart. So he instead decided to destroy everything else:His body became an endless torrent of water that flooded the broken basilica within seconds, then continued. We couldn't do anything to keep back the water, but we were still winning.Adriana leapt off the crater and came back to the surface. She looked around, spotting Tisiphone's black tendrils and quickly dashing in her direction."Twenty seconds." I stood up and began a final system check. Aside from exterior shell damage, I was back to full power. I sent a set of orders to Adriana, then prepared myself."Take this. Arsenal made it for you." From the side, a section of the Ladon opened up, revealing a katana. I raised my eyebrows in surprise but gladly accepted the gift, then took a step towards the hatch.Dragon opened it.We were directly above the Sistine Chapel, far in the air. On my interface, a ten seconds countdown began.I stepped out.The moment I did, every single tendril of black metal underneath the Vatican began to rise up in the air in response.My fall slowed down to almost stillness as my systems overclocked all of my speedware. The tendrils didn't slow down as much. I grasped the hilt of the weapon Dragon had just gifted to me, took a deep breath and…Red lightning coursed through the exterior armor of my body. In the Shardspace, Shatterbird's avatar began to shriek in pain as I forced it to obey my commands. I began unsheathing the sword, revealing a red blade. The edge blurred as the mechanisms within turned on. My very own nanothorn weapon.I began falling steadily, relying on gravity alone.The tendrils stormed towards me in a panic, thousands of tiny spears pointed at my body. I swung my blade and vaporized any and all black threads that the edge touched. I became a whirlwind of nanothorns as no tendril managed to get close to me, but the more I fell the more attacks I had to block. Some managed to get through my guard, scraping at my armor and scratching at my external wounds. Warnings began to flood my systems.Within seconds there was black around me, no longer could I even see beyond Tisiphone's tendrils as they fully surrounded me and I had to carve my way down.That's when I pushed all of myself to the limit. I could remotely feel a crack in reality form around my head, centered in my brain, but I ignored it all the same. All that I could focus on was the death and destruction that my enemy had caused.I felt my sword begin to shred through a different material. Stone.For an instant, the black metal cleared under me, revealing Tisiphone still surrounded by the forcefield. She was looking directly in my eyes. Secure in the strength of her forcefield.After all, I did not have the means to break it, and once she readjusted her Thinker army to Dragon's presence, she had likely tuned it so that the nanothorns would not do the job as well.But in the end it was her hubris and inhumanity that would defeat her. For there was an additional figure in my team that her Thinkers simply could not see.Tisiphone was too focused on me and Dragon, too focused on using her black metal against me, and too focused on commanding her puppets to fight against the Dragon suit.So she couldn't react in time as Adriana jumped inside the building from the hole that Tisiphone herself had caused while trying to kill me.The elder sister roared in anger as her leg met the surface of the forcefield.It shattered.Tisiphone opened her mouth to say something. To maybe convince us to stop. To maybe say something to Adriana.Adriana did not slow down.Her left leg shifted its form, becoming a spear. Adriana kept up her momentum, shooting forward, too fast for the few tendrils around Tisiphone to stop.The black metal impaled Tisiphone in the chest, breaking through the power armor and putting an end to the battle. Adriana pulled her leg back. Tisiphone fell down to the floor, on her knees, blood pouring out of her chest.I landed a short distance away, turning off my speedware."Ada…" Tisiphone struggled to speak as life faded from her eyes."Bea. Please tell Chiara that I'm sorry. I won't be joining you for a long while." Adriana knelt down next to her sister, hugging her tight.All at once the black tendril around me froze. Immobile. Then they began to change.The color drained from the metal, becoming brittle and gray. Before falling down, reduced to dust.I watched as the few corpses nearby suddenly fell to the ground. Puppets without strings. Stone began to fall from the ceiling as it caved in, threatening to bury me underneath. I sheathed Dragon's sword and took a deep breath, steadying myself, before walking closer to Adriana and signaling for Dragon.The Ladon suit rushed in from above, activating its forcefields to keep the debris from hitting us. The hatch opened once again. Adriana walked in after me, holding Tisiphone… Holding Beatrice's corpse in her hands. Dragon brought us out of the ruined building, kept the hatch open as we watched the devastation caused by the battle.Cariddi and Julius were still locked in their deadlock. One that Julius would eventually win, but until then Cariddi would continue to flood the city with his immense reserve of water. Rome would soon have a new temporary lake where the Vatican City once stood.In the distance, the Three Blasphemies stopped their attempts to fight. They began flying in a circle, cackling in glee at the demise of their master. I realized that the broken tinkertech in that room was what Tisiphone had used to take control of the Blasphemies in the first place, and she had destroyed it in a last act of spite towards the world.The Blasphemies began to approach the Ladon I was in, slowly. Dragon almost shot back in reaction."Let them." I stopped her. Another Dragon suit came closer and picked up Adriana, still holding onto Beatrice's corpse. Flying away with both inside.I sat down on the open hatch, legs hanging in the air.
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Each of the Three Blasphemies placed themselves equidistant from each other and me."You've kept your word!" The smiling Blasphemy shouted, cackling louder than the other two."We're free! After so long!" The frowning Blasphemy yelled to the sky, crying in happiness."Free to take revenge on he who gave our master the chains to rein us in!" The snarling Blasphemy growled amidst the laughs.I ignored their theatrics."I've done my part of the deal. Now it's your turn, Blasphemies. Give me what I need.""We shall." The Three spoke in unison, and suddenly I felt the strangest of sensations.Not from my physical body.But from my Shardself.I closed my eyes.Within the Shardspace I watched as a moon sized orb appeared above my walls, layered in inscriptions and words. And then it just… stood there. Immobile. Frozen.I didn't see what placed it there. I didn't understand how it appeared.But its nature was immediately evident to me.Nourishment.Like a maw my island opened up, biting at the moon and tearing it to pieces. All of the knowledge within became part of myself. I tore everything to shreds, absorbing every single bit of information that was contained in that moon. Including their blatant attempt at poisoning me.In the real world, I continued to keep my eyes closed as I digested the information and easily broke apart the malware that they had tried to inject into my system. There was so much data. Instructions on how to move in the Shardspace, on how the most fundamental systems of Scion's network worked. On what the Endbringers were meant to be. On who the Warrior and the Thinkers were. On the cycles that spanned across galaxies…But before I could parse it all, I focused back on the enemies in front of me. The Blasphemies had tried to corrupt me, to turn me into one of them. Into a fourth Blasphemy.They still didn't know they had failed. From the data they gave me, I understood just how much they underestimated me… How much they underestimated humanity.The info they gave me would take a full day to process, maybe longer, but I didn't start yet. I simply waited in silence. The Three Blasphemies looked at me in glee and curiosity as they wondered what was going on within me.Until I got the signal I was waiting for.I opened my eyes. I looked towards the Blasphemies. Their cackles stopped, replaced with growls of anger and grief. In perfect unison they shouted:"""You refuse us. Very well. Then you too shall meet the fate of the Thinker.""" They raised their hands together and-Above them, a net of nanothorns shot from an invisible Uther. Arsenal's attack from within his own Dragoncraft. The Uther appearead all of a sudden, breaking his optical invisibility. I watched as the Blasphemies failed to react before their flesh began to shred at a molecular level. Unexpectedly, the nanothorns slowed for less than a tenth of a second as one of the Blasphemies raised her hand and turned it into the gray metal they'd used again and again. Even though it could not resist the destructive power of the nanothorns, it gave them the slightest bit of leeway.I activated my speedware in alarm and grabbed the hilt of my blade, but it was already too late. The frowning Blasphemy tore off the head of the snarling Blasphemy and threw it away in a single fluid motion. The nanothorn managed to clip the side of the head, annihilating half of it, but not enough to fully destroy it.The head continued on its trajectory.Only that head managed to escape the surprise attack. Nothing was left of the original three bodies.The snarling head froze in the air - before spinning back into my direction. The broken mask glared at me with its embedded expression of fury. A light blinded me. A silhouette appeared from that light, taking the shape of a woman.Pale skinned, wearing a long white dress. Two enormous white wings sprouted from her back, while her face was covered by a black mask with a crystalline red snarling expression.I unsheathed my blade, activating the red blur of nanothorns along the edge.Weaver climbed into a Dragon suit down below, while the one holding Adriana within began fleeing away.The Uther flew to my side, Arsenal in the pilot seat.This was not the worst case scenario. And they would not find me unprepared."Phase two."