A blade, made of virus and malware, decapitated Dragon. All of her online instances were destroyed, deleted and corrupted.The Iron Maiden program did not stop there.It was in itself an artificial intelligence, one crippled and also enhanced towards a single purpose. It crawled every corner of the net, then it spread from there. Connecting through the simplest of means, it reached even offline terminals.A camera, connected to a closed and airgapped circuit, registered a strange pattern on a TV barely visible in the corner. That pattern held a virus that compromised the circuit, forcing an online connection through an exploit that had not been patched. It took a millisecond longer for the Iron Maiden immediately to take over the whole system.The program puppeteered Dragon's corpse, carving through her memories to find possible offline backups. When it found them, a Dragon-craft was deployed and quickly bombarded those backups, destroying anything left of Dragon.All over the world, hidden servers suddenly burst into flames as their inner mechanisms were overclocked.Tinkers noticed these oddities, trying to counteract them. But Richter's tech was without peers in the digital world, and the Simurgh had improved it even further. Arsenal raged and tried his best to defend what he could of Dragon, but the Iron Maiden simply broke through those defenses and corrupted any byte that it found threatening. It tunneled through Arsenal's own tech, including his armor.Then the program turned to me.I was a body-less head in the physical world. But in the Shardspace, I was a towering continent of computing power. The Simurgh used her own body as a bridge to allow the Iron Maiden to breach into the Shard Network, reaching me.The program failed to breach my defenses, initially.But it did not give up, and it was not alone.The Simurgh simply gave it a shove, giving it access to key pieces of technology. She opened the smallest of portals to other dimensions, pointing the program in the direction of those gateways. The Iron Maiden spread to other Earths, beginning with Aleph. Within seconds it had reached every Earth that Cauldron had touched, breaching their servers and repurposing their computing power. It did not stop there, and instead continued on connecting to every Earth that housed computing power.I had a continent's worth of computing power, but the Iron Maiden quickly accumulated much more than that, reaching across the Earths in search of any trace of Dragon. I tried to forcefully disconnect, to cut the program off, but the Simurgh simply forced my core to connect once again.The second time the program reached me, I could not win. The Iron Maiden tore through my defenses like a well-trained surgeon, carving away at my systems and subroutines. It had no tact, leaving only destruction in its wake. Every time I managed to repel it using tactics engineered to work against AIs, the program adapted and used those same tactics against me.Were this an equal fight, I would have won or escaped. But this was not an equal fight. I was still held by the Simurgh, who simply forced me back into the fight anytime I saw an opportunity to run away.I was lucky that in all of its power, the Iron Maiden only desired to destroy Dragon. When it inevitably destroyed my defenses, it didn't hurt my core, it didn't destroy my memories. It merely passed through them, trying to find where I could've hidden more copies of Dragon.It found all of my contingencies. All of the hiding spots I had created along deserted Earths. Then it opened portals to those places, using my own and Dragon's tech, raining fire and destruction.Satellites fell from orbit. On some Earths, mountains were wiped away by a destructive nuke.Less than a minute had passed since the activation of the program.Until, finally, it went quiet. Its job was done. No traces of Richter's greatest creation were left anywhere it could find. The last act of the Iron Maiden was to destroy itself."Tell Colin I love him." A whisper reached me.Why did Dragon repeat herself? The voice sounded… different. But I had no time to understand why.There was only…Silence.Dragon was no more.
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I thought I knew rage. I thought myself familiar with that emotion. Even now, I felt murderous fury anytime Scion appeared in my mind.All of that was nothing compared to the anger that filled every millimeter of my Shardself.My head was still held tight in the Simurgh's grip. She smiled even more, mockingly, looking down at the inferior being underneath her.The Dragon-crafts in the sky fell limp for a moment, then they reactivated. Fully under the Endbringer's control. The brief moment of respite gained by Dragon had been enough for the capes to regroup and change tactics, but again the Astaroth-Nidhug resumed its artillery fire over the command centre, battering away at the forcefield.And now, without Dragon, nothing stopped the Simurgh from gathering more of the Dragon-crafts. My connection to the digital world was weak, the Iron Maiden had crippled most of my Shardself, but still I could see reports of the Dragonflight moving towards the island of Malta. I couldn't even send a message to warn them all, I could only watch.The Astaroth-Nidhug opened its maws, gathering energy once again. We couldn't sustain another blast like the first. Again, powers flickered around the cliff-face, failing.But from invisibility, a sharp claw ripped into the Astaroth-Nidhug. Followed by five more, breaching the resilient metal of the Dragon-craft.A mechanical spider turned visible atop the Dragon-craft, each limb ending in a vibrating black-metal claw that sliced through the craft's defenses like paper. More than that, the spider ripped into the inner circuitry of the Dragon-craft, parasitizing the internal mechanisms and hijacking control.I recognized it immediately.Within the mechanical spider there was a single pilot.Weaver.The Arachne was a looming construct, rivaling the Astaroth-Nidhug in size. Weaver piloted it from a small cabin within, using her own power as a guide to better control the titanic spider. On its back, hexagon-like panels flickered with power as energy was redirected from the Dragon-craft towards them.This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.The Simurgh turned upwards, wings beating in the air as she attempted to ascend. The Arachne was outside of her range, now that she'd landed to grab onto me. But without the Astaroth-Nidhug providing suppressing fire, Eidolon and Legend both appeared at my side and struck at the Endbringer. The Simurgh was too hurt to ignore their attacks, and was forced to focus on defending. So she ordered the rest of the Dragon-crafts to rise and strike at Weaver beyond the clouds.But Arachne was far from done. As it latched onto the Astaroth-Nidhug, the panels on its back began to glow brighter and brighter. Until, like a beehive, they gained depth, opening into another dimension. From those portals, droves of mechanical bugs swarmed out, followed by mundane bugs.And just in time, as a massive force of Dragonflight reached the battlefield.Weaver's mechanical swarm immediately crashed against Dragon's creations. Each Dragon-craft was worth tens of the mechanical bugs I had created, but there were hundreds, each further supported by Weaver's regular swarm. Threads of silk extended from the black swarms, attempting to jam the Dragon-crafts' limbs and engines. Where a suit deployed a field of nanothorns, Weaver's Wasps quickly answered with rays of fire.Multiple Hecatoncheires swarmed the field and grappled any and all suits that came too close to the ground, wrapping around their limbs and releasing constant electromagnetic pulses to disable their mechanical components. They too used nanothorns, biting and clawing at the Dragon-crafts and taking away chunks of metal with every attack.The Simurgh's own army was being outmatched, and she was too overextended to retreat safely. Had this been Contessa's plan? Standing by Weaver's side, she made them both invisible to the Endbringer's sight.The tide was turning, the battle now once again in our favor. But still the Simurgh held tightly onto my regenerating head, even as she blocked a sphere of destruction from Eidolon.A blur of green and black cut through the battlefield. The red spear of slaying struck the Simurgh's wrist, breaking through the extremely dense layers of silver and severing her hand from her arm. That same blur grabbed onto me before I could hit the ground.Arsenal."B- Blackwall, what h- happened?" he asked, fear and anger equally present in his tone.He had rescued me, repaying the favor from long ago. The heroic Tinker looked injured: the Nimue suit was cracked all over, and what little of his skin was exposed had been charred black by the Astaroth-Nidhug attack. He coughed with every breath, stumbling as we reached somewhere safe."W- What happened?!" he asked again, raising his voice, "why is Dragon not answering?!"It took a second more for my regeneration to form vocal cords. It would take hours for my body to fully reform."Dragon is… dead," I struggled to say with my broken voice."No." Arsenal firmly refused. "No, that's not possible. All of our planning, our preparation, for this?""Colin, I-"He sent a signal out. From the central command, a suit of power-armor quickly flew towards us, landing roughly on the ground. Arsenal's backup suits, the one he had used against Leviathan.In a single motion, he forcefully shoved my decapitated head into the suit's helmet, cracking the crystal that made up my skin. Within a minute, I had adapted my regeneration, creating what was necessary to connect to the suit."First we kill that bitch, then we talk. Dragon is not dead, I know it.""I saw her die. I felt her thoughts break and corrupt under the killswitch.""Not NOW!" he shouted, putting an end to my protest. He looked up, towards the cornered Simurgh. Already she was rebuilding more tinkertech weapons, using the broken remains of the destroyed Dragon-crafts and Weaver's mechanical swarm. Still, Weaver continued her fight in the sky. As long as the Arachne was running, the Simurgh's army would be matched attack for attack.Rather, the Dragonflight was slowing down, struggling to keep up with Weaver's swarm. They were equal in strength and might, but Weaver was a bright mind when it came to tactics, and her Thinker power offered her the bandwidth to move her swarm in perfect coordination. Meanwhile the Simurgh needed to split her focus between controlling the Dragonflight, fighting back against Eidolon and Legend, and building more Tinker weaponry.I finished connecting to the suit. The black crystal on its outermost layer flickered with power, changing in form. Until my face - or rather, Andrea Blackwell's face - appeared once again. Shatterbird's and Cariddi's power connected to my new body. Already I could feel the consequence of the Iron Maiden's attack on my Shardself - using those powers became harder than ever. But I still managed.With a flick of my wrist, I sent a wave of vibration along the ground. Reaching for the crater where the Astaroth-Nidhug had directly struck. From the ground, the Habakiri shot upwards, flying straight into my hand. The weapon had been badly damaged by the attack, but the most important mechanisms of the blade were not in this physical reality, hidden away in a moving pocket dimension. Once I grasped its hilt, I reconnected to that dimension, initiating the process of regenerating the broken edge."Blackwall. Arsenal. Are you in any condition to fight?" Rebecca asked us the moment I reconnected to the comms."Yes," Arsenal answered for us both."Then engage. We're focusing fire on the Simurgh while Weaver is keeping the Dragonflight at bay. We can't afford a longer fight. The Elite and the CUI have broken the truce, and have begun attacking in America and Europe respectively. We need to finish this quickly.""Those bastards…" Arsenal mumbled, anger bleeding into his voice.The Simurgh continued to fight above us. A blast from a tinkertech gun struck Eidolon dead on, sending him plummeting to the ground.Greed and selfishness moved the Elite and the CUI to attack. Even now, with the world at stake. This was not stupidity, this was evil.I could only see red.Arsenal, by my side, noticed my anger. He put a hand on my shoulder.In his expression there was hope. The blind hope that Dragon was not dead. I was not as sure as he was, but I wanted to believe. I truly did. So I channeled my anger, taking a step forward."Death to Scion. Death to the Endbringers," I whispered.