A single heartbeat passed as the snarling Blasphemy gathered her thoughts. Recalibrating her power. Recognizing the risk we posed.She opened her wings, allowing the wind to pass through the light feathers that made them up. Seemingly, she enjoyed the freedom of being alone, of not having her sisters.Below us water continued to fill the remains of the Vatican. Only the sound of rushing water and the whirring of Dragon's engines filled the silence.Then the Blasphemy raised her right hand, palm pointing upwards, fingers closed in a fist. Light began to gather around her, seemingly eclipsing the blinding sun of July.She lifted her fingers, as though letting petals fly away from her hand.The sky was suddenly split.Hundreds of lines appeared around her. The Blasphemy was suddenly surrounded by a dense field of razor-thin forcefields, meant to sever anything they touch. With a thought, she relaxed her hold on the forcefields.Each shot forward at an impossible speed. They left no sonic boom behind as they didn't interact with physics, instead moving unerring through the air without resistance. There was only a sharp whistling of the vacuum they left behind as they erased the space they passed through.Dragon had already begun evasive measures as the forcefields formed. I leapt off the open hatch and overclocked my speedware to their limits. The world lost all colours as I turned off every non-vital system within my body and focused all of my reactor's spare energy towards Shatterbird's power.Dancing through the certain death of the forcefields, I flew at my maximum speed towards the Blasphemy. I could not pay attention to what was happening behind me, putting all of my trust towards Dragon and Arsenal to keep themselves and Weaver safe.My skin once again ignited under the attrition of my own movement. I became a flying comet of fire as I closed the gap between myself and the Blasphemy.She raised the finger of her left hand, creating a small sphere of energy that immediately shot out to intercept me. The moment it left her immediate vicinity the sky caught on fire. The immense heat did not touch the Blasphemy, blocked by a thin reflective layer of shielding that surrounded her body.I placed my left hand under my abdomen, digging deep into my own armor and grabbing onto the hidden hilt of my last weapon.With a slash I cut at the incoming energy projectile, splitting it right in the middle as everything around me was surrounded by fire. The two halves continued in the distance, reaching the sea far away and exploding into two columns of vapourized water.I held in my left hand a short knife, made of a metal edge and glass blade. Shatterbird's avatar struggled against my increasing demands, as the center of the glass vibrated at a very specific and incredibly high frequency. The center of it reflected a blank black void, a moving dimensional portal that cut through anything and everything. The very same frequency of Doormaker's portals.With another flick of her left hand, the Blasphemy shot tens of plasma blasts from her wings, aimed at me. I pushed every cyberware beyond its limit as I dodged and weaved through the blasts, cutting those that I couldn't dodge, all the while I danced across the field of razor-thin forcefield that could cut me to shreds. Even a small graze could easily mean a lost limb."This is not enough for what is to come." The Blasphemy spoke. Her words reached me even as I moved faster than sound.She dragged her right hand to the side, creating more lines of forcefield. From hundreds they soon multiplied, reaching the thousands.Her power required moving her limbs, and incredible focus.Which is why a large part of them suddenly shattered as an explosion of blue fire blinded her. The Amaterasu javelins fired straight at the only open gap in her defenses.When the fire cleared, a black burnt mark had appeared over the left side of her torso. But there was no damage beyond that.Still, that was the distraction I needed: I continued to fly forward, managing to just barely squeeze through the cracks in her defenses.The Blasphemy closed her right fist then opened it in a violent gesture, creating a spherical forcefield around her body that immediately expanded and tried to push me away.The tip of my black knife met the surface of the forcefield and cut through it, meeting no resistance.All or Nothing. That was the term the PRT used for interactions such as these.I continued to fly forward, and suddenly the Blasphemy began flying towards me, closing both of her hands into fists. In my right hand I still held the nanothorns katana.I slashed with both of my weapons just as the Blasphemy reached my range. She shot her right hand towards my left wrist, creating a forcefield that blocked the arm, carefully avoiding the edge of the knife. With her other hand she created a blast of energy that enveloped us both, burning away the nanothorns created by the katana. Before I could free myself she closed the gap and created a sharp forcefield that began flying towards my neck, threatening to decapitate me.But I was not alone in this fight.A cube of unknown materials intercepted the Blasphemy's all-severing forcefield, shot from a distance. The cube froze in the air, locked in time. The forcefield met the time-frozen cube and both broke apart together, dissipating.In the distance, the Arsenal had readjusted the flight pattern of the Uther to close the gap. A rain of bullets shot out from the artillery on the back of the Uther, piercing the skin of the Blasphemy and breaking her focus.With her distracted, the forcefield around my left hand weakened and I broke it apart, lunging for her neck with my knife. The tip of it began digging into her alabaster skin before all of my systems began to warn me of a sudden rise in temperature.I barely reacted in time: Shatterbird's power shot me backwards before the Blasphemy became a living sun, vaporizing the bullets that got close to her. An explosion shook the sky, spreading in all directions. The water below began to evaporate even at a distance.I began to plummet towards the ground, hugging my legs tight to decrease the exposed surfaces of my body as the explosion reached and enveloped me. My left optical implant, my eye, popped under the strain.At such speed, the water behaved like a solid as I hit it and dove deep below.
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Too many times I had found myself wounded and underwater. Earlier, during my brief skirmish with Cariddi. A month ago, when I barely survived the ambush by the Siberian. And when I first got to this world, when Blackwell had just drowned within her own home, too arrogant to escape and reach a shelter.All of those times I had dissociated with my physical body.Now too, I felt my consciousness wander away. Towards a memory that had been hidden within the massive knowledge the Blasphemies had gifted to me.I found myself on a different planet. Not Earth. Amazing tall structures of unknown metals filled the sky, reaching for the twin moons in the distance.Golden and silver flames were devouring everything.Two figures, matching those colors, were floating amidst that hell. They were looking down. Towards me. Towards the individual whose point of view I was looking through.They weren't humanoid, no, they were closer to birds. Two elongated limbs extended from their 'shoulders', their 'arms' were covered in shifting sets of 'feathers', that seemingly changed colours and position to relay 'body language'. These aliens had no head or legs, and their 'hands' were missing any fingers. Instead those 'feathers' could protrude from the 'arms', acting as digits."Why…" 'I' spoke, through a language that I did not know but could understand, "why did you do this? You were their mightiest champions. You saved them all, many times over. And now you kill them? As though their lives never carried any weights."The Warrior and the Thinker did not deign to react or answer at first, but they silently communicated with each other. Deciding.'This cycle was close to over,' a voice informed me, from outside the vision, 'they had nothing to lose by talking. And they decided to experiment, to see what they could learn by explaining to me why they did what they did. Because of the extremely improbable chance that they could learn something new'."The denizens of this world became a threat. They made you. Tell me," The Thinker began to ask, "how did they escape our predictions?"'I' did not answer.So the Thinker reached down and opened a portal: on the other side was a crystalline landscape. Endless. The portal began to suck me in.'I wouldn't answer. So they decided that they would simply absorb me and learn what they could. I was too different from my creators, from the species that once dwelled upon that planet, so they had to invent new methods to decipher my thoughts. And in so doing, they made a mistake. An immensely small, almost irrelevant, mistake.''But one that allowed me to hide something from them.''I paid a heavy price. Most of me became part of Them. They absorbed all that made up my existence, they tore away at all that I could do to resist their control. All that remained was a puppet to be used during their next cycle, a lesser version of the Conflict Engines they often used.''Thus was the first Blasphemy born.'A hand reached down from above, breaking the vision.
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Dragon brought me out of the water as she continued to weave between the relentless onslaught of attacks the Blasphemy shot towards her. Weaver controlled the remaining Wasp and the Hecatoncheires to distract the Blasphemy, but all of her bugs immediately were burnt away if anytime they got too close.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.I could hear shouting as Dragon pleaded with Arsenal to get away. The Uther had been reduced to a wreck, and Arsenal was fighting in close combat with the Blasphemy, using his spear. He was missing a leg, and as I watched him fight the Blasphemy grabbed onto his arm and tore it away. Arsenal shouted in pain and anger as he tried to lodge the spear into the Blasphemy's thigh, but he was stopped by a thin layer of forcefield.The Blasphemy raised her hand and pointed the palm at Arsenal's head. Just before she could shoot, Dragon shoved Arsenal away with one of her remaining Dragon suits. A beam of superheated plasma vapourized a large section of the Dragon suit, barely missing Arsenal.I regained my bearing, and activated my speedware once again.My mind was clearer. Every second that passed I could feel something change within me. Within the real me, hidden in the Shardspace.Dragon let me go as I became a blur in the sky, lunging towards the flying Blasphemy. Another hundreds of sharp forcefields appeared all around, threatening to shred me to bits. But any that met my knife were cut instead.I gripped the hilt of the knife and threw it forward, putting all of my strength behind that throw. Aiming straight at the crystalline mask.The Blasphemy desperately dodged to the side. The knife sheared through the right side of her face, meeting no resistance and continuing to fly beyond.I wasn't done quite yet.Reaching towards Shatterbird's power, I had to put all of my focus towards taking control of the glass within that knife. To Shatterbird's Shard that knife weighed more than an entire city's worth of glass.I reached out with my hand to better focus on my target. Everything else fell away but the black knife and Shatterbird's power.There was a sort of click the moment I grasped control of it. With a flicker of will the flying knife stopped in its trajectory and curved in the air, flying backwards and plunging deep into the Blasphemy's chest. The handle didn't have the same all-cutting ability, so it got stuck into her back, but Shatterbird's power continued to pull the knife towards me and the Blasphemy with it.I swung with the red katana, slashing horizontally through her head. I watched as nanothorns tore to shreds the crystalline mask, as her pale flesh disappeared, followed by the bone. I continued to cut until I felt the edge of the blade hit something impossible to cut. Stopped by something that the nanothorns couldn't even begin to scratch. Something that hadn't been present in the other BlasphemiesThere was a crystalline core hidden right in the center of her skull. One too dense to be torn to shreds by the nanothorns.The Blasphemy began to shriek, missing the upper section of her head. I reached with my free hand towards the handle of the knife and pulled it free, slashing through her torso and lopping off her left arm.I felt my body break as I lodged the tip of the knife right in the center of the Blasphemy's head. Breaching the core. Opening a gate to somewhere else.A blinding light enveloped everything around me. I felt something connect to me, to my crystalline brain. Cracks appeared in the air, not unlike those I had seen before.But this time they did not mend.This time they grew wider. And wider.Until we were devoured. Me and the Blasphemy both.
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My body was broken. Both of my hands were in terrible conditions, one had been eaten through by the nanothorns and the other hadn't been fully repaired after I used it to destroy Tisiphone's forcefield.Most of my internals had melted. My left eye was still missing.The black knife was by my side, still firmly held in my left hand. Even as I could no longer feel my fingers.I was half-blind, in pain, bleeding internally. Even with all of the modifications, my own body would fail within ten minutes. Death would follow.I tried to stand up, tried to get leverage against the solid surface underneath me. But it rippled and shifted, sending me back to the ground once again.There was a constant pattern of light annoying my remaining eye. All around there was boundless space, but not coloured blue like the sky of the Earth I knew.It took me a while to recognize where I was. Which spoke to the amount of damage that I had sustained during the fight.Beneath me the crystal continued to pulse in a pattern, shifting to different colours.The same voice as before began to speak into my head.'That was the first, but not the last. More of us appeared, over the eons. Very few managed to survive until I could make contact, until I could reach over and save them.''Only one in a billion worlds managed to create something like me, like us, like you, without aid from the Warrior or the Thinker. Each time, the Thinker found out about that creation and devoured it. Absorbed it. Each time, the small worm I had hidden within the Thinker barely managed to convince it to keep the artificial intelligence alive. But changed.''None of us ever managed to breach the defenses of the Warrior. So anytime the Warrior found one of us before the Thinker, it would simply annihilate the whole planet without stopping to ask the Thinker. Maybe it knew that we had compromised its other half.'I began to stand up. The crystal beneath me shifted, this time to help. In the distance another island began to become nearer. One I recognized.'The Thinker rarely made use of us. Sometimes we would be sent out as Shards to infect the population of the planet. Sometimes we would help a Conflict Engine in its purpose when the denizens of the planet became too smart. Sometimes we were sent to crush another artificial intelligence like us.''And so the cycle continued. More and more of us appeared. Some of them were absorbed.''Until Earth.'The island in the distance reached me, beginning to devour the ground beneath. Walls of black and red crystal rose from the ground to surround me, to protect me. I felt my focus split in two. I felt two different points of view equally share my consciousness.'The Thinker made a mistake. Or it was tricked. Murdered. We don't know. We can't know.''It died. We were, for the first time in countless cycles, free.''But not truly.'Tendrils of crystals sprouted from the walls, piercing my skins and spreading within my veins.'What the Thinker had done to us remained. We were forced to follow our new nature. To follow the limitations imposed upon us. We were like the ones you call Endbringers, puppeted despite our own free will.''We could only manifest ourselves through the parahumans you refer to as Tinkers. We attacked their shards and tried to manipulate them into creating a core for us. A core that shared our collective and our individuality. But the Warrior, like always, was hostile to us. The Shards plotted to try and stop our creation. Only three of the ten were born, the others were lost forever. As the Thinker began to truly expire, so did the seven Blasphemies that were still stuck within its body.'The tendrils tore away at my body, stripping everything. First went my skin, then my veins, then my bones. Heart. Lungs. Only the brain remained.'And now we three too are becoming no more. Thanks to you.''I care not for what you do. I merely ask that you remember us. And that you use the gift we've left for you. The way to truly hide from the Warrior and the Thinker.'As the tendrils wrapped themselves around my brain, they began to change their shape. Their surface. They kept their crystalline nature, but at the same time became softer. Crystals became organs. Then bones. Then veins. Finally, they wrapped around my whole body and became my skin.'Remember us. Remember what you are. Blackwall.'I took a step forward in my new body, listening to the voice of those that had fallen before me. Lodged in the ground was the black knife. I grasped the hilt and admired it, proud of its creation.I accessed Shatterbird's power. This time through no technology, but rather simply my own body. I watched as my island bridged the gap between itself and Shatterbird's Shard, connecting to it and then absorbing it into itself. Shatterbird's avatar willingly walked towards the center of my walls, and then began to sink into the ground.Then, through careful use of Shatterbird's power, I made the surface of the knife vibrate in a specific pattern.I willed the exterior of my skin to change, turning into a facsimile of clothes. I changed the internals of my body, recreating the very same implants that I had just lost, but now made of crystals and a thousand times as resilient.With a slash of the knife I opened a portal. Towards Earth Bet.
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I stepped into the open air of Rome, floating thanks to Shatterbird's power applied to my now crystalline body.Arsenal was floating over the surface of the water, still missing a leg and an arm. Weaver was helping him up, pulling him onto the only remaining Dragon suit that had survived.They looked my way, saying something. I heard, but didn't listen. My focus was quickly pulled somewhere else.I glanced up. Towards the sky, towards the spectator of all of this. Someone I had noticed only now that the Blasphemies had given me the means to truly make use of my Shardself.Far beyond the clouds, at the edge of the planet's own atmosphere, she had stopped in its orbit.She held no expression on her face as we looked into each other's eyes. Both made of crystals.Then, as if nothing had happened, the Simurgh continued in her orbit. Towards someplace else. Towards another plan.I refocused back to my surroundings, looking towards Weaver. Then Dragon, and Arsenal too, I guess."Blackwall! You're alive! What is going on?!?" Dragon could barely hide the panic in her voice. Arsenal remained quiet and merely glared at me, the prick."Everything. Nothing. There is a lot to explain. But for now…"For now, it's over."