Ravens of Eternity

202 Ice Queen, Pt Callie groaned in pain as she picked herself up off the ground. Icy rain fell down all around her, and dampened her hair flat. The cold bit into her skin while she tasted blood in her mouth.

She felt pangs of defeat and humiliation after being knocked around so easily. By someone she felt was far inferior to her. That feeling quickly subsided as she convinced herself that she wasn’t beaten – she was merely caught off guard. If she had her full kit on, she felt she could have taken Miko on with no problems. And if her army was even close to halfway done, they would’ve all been dead by now.

Her grin grew back as she watched dozens of her Hallowed swarm the area. They came up the main cobblestone street, ran past while she stood in the courtyard, and crammed themselves into the mansion beyond.

No, she thought to herself, this was just a setback. Nothing more. It only happened because I wasn’t prepared enough.

She quickly jumped up and pulled herself onto an awning, then skipped over the mansion wall, and over to an adjacent residential rooftop. She rolled onto a shoulder as she landed over the uneven cobble tiles, hopped up onto her feet, and watched as more and more Hallowed ran their way up the mountain.

She laughed loudly, despite the rain that fell down all around her.

“I feel sorry for those idiots,” she exclaimed. “They’re gonna get ripped apart. Too bad I won’t be there to see it.”

Callie spun around in alarm as a THUMP landed close behind her. She brought up her hammer defensively when she saw a lightly armored woman in front of her. The Prophet was shaken to her core when she felt waves of power exude from her.

“Well well well,” said Eva. “What do we have here, hm?”

.....

“W-who the hell are you?” Callie cried out.

Eva didn’t bother to respond. Instead, she holstered her handcannon, and drew the Ra’ventrii blade out instead.

“You know, you remind me of a couple people,” Eva continued. “A brother and sister I met at the academy. I mean, you look just like those two. And if what I’m seeing here is true, you’re just as murderous and destructive as they were.”

She twirled the blade in her hand as she began to circle Callie.

“I’m a Prophet of Gaea,” said Callie. “And you’re about to find out exactly how murderous I can be!”

Callie’s eyes glittered at the prospect of doing more violence. For some reason, she was simply attracted to it. Some voice deep inside her goaded her aggression, pushed her towards it even further.

A small part of her wondered why that was, but it was quickly silenced by her overwhelming need to cause harm.

She raised her war hammer with glee, and tightened her grip until her knuckles were bone white.

“Mia and Darius already tried to do shit like this,” Eva countered. “And we stopped them. Just like we’re gonna stop you and your little mindless army.”

Callie laughed in the face of Eva’s threat. She found it utterly ludicrous. But then realization dawned on her.

“So you’re Freya!” she exclaimed. “Mia told me all about you. About how easy it was for her to tear into all your academy friends. Just like how my Hallowed are gonna tear into your new friends up there!”

Callie laughed even harder as she watched Eva darken. Clearly, mentioning the death of her friends dug into her deeply.

“Impossible,” said Eva. “Mia’s dead. She reduced herself to little more than fertilizer last time I saw her.”

“You can’t kill a Prophet of Gaea,” Callie retorted. “We’ll rise even higher no matter how many times we’re struck down!”

Callie leapt forward with blinding speed. She launched off with such strength that the stone tiles that covered the roof cracked into pieces from the force. Her war hammer swung down with such power and precision that Eva had no choice but to hop back to evade.

The hammer slammed onto the roof with a resounding CRUNCH, and shattered the cobble tiles underneath.

But she didn’t stop there. Callie kept charging forward and swung her hammer over and over at Eva, determined to turn her into minced meat. Her only desire at that moment was to connect once. It was all she needed to break her opponent in two.

Eva spun lithely and gracefully as she evaded each and every one of Callie’s powerful attacks. Despite her armor and environmental suit, she could feel the force the hammer made as it careened in and out of range.

Getting hit by it would most definitely hurt.

“Aren’t you supposed to be genetically superior?” taunted Eva. “I mean, shouldn’t you have hit me long ago? Or are you lying about being a Prophet? Maybe you’re just some wanna-be synthetic.”

Callie was immediately angered by Eva’s provocations. Especially when she heard the word ‘synthetic’. She gripped her hammer even tighter, then swung down hard. She missed yet again, and struck the tile roof yet again.

And it began to crumble around them.

“Don’t you dare call me that!” she screamed. “You’re just a useless Refugee – a true disgrace to humanity! You’re literally someone else’s refuse! Trash! Genetic garbage! All you can do is run your ass away! Why is that? Afraid to fight back, coward?!”

Eva immediately stopped backing up, and stepped into an aggressive stance. A grin formed on her face.

“Oh! Great point!” she said. “I suppose I should strike back, huh?”

She poured every bit of her standard energy into a strike, and launched forward with deafening power. The roof where she stood cracked and crumbled, while the roof itself shattered along her path.

Callie was utterly helpless at the show of strength, and just barely raised her hammer in time to parry.

Their weapons met with a resounding CLANG, and the synth was thrown back a half dozen meters. She recovered even as she flew back in the air, flipped over, and landed back on her two feet.

But stumbled as she did so.

The energy of Eva’s strike reverbered up and down her hammer’s shaft, and she felt its vibrations shake both her arms uncontrollably.

Callie barely had the time to regain her balance, much less center herself and fight back. Instead, she found herself backpedaling and on the defensive almost immediately. Eva had charged at her and attacked her relentlessly.

She swung her blade with incredible power. Combined with her stunning footwork, Callie was completely overwhelmed. She realized she was completely outmatched as Eva danced all around her with incredible speed, power, and precision. One moment she swung at her from her left flank, and the next she stabbed at her from the right.

Her movements weren’t just overwhelming – it felt like she was fighting against a tornado, or a hurricane. As though she was a force of nature by herself.

All the Prophet could do was block and parry all those strikes, all while getting flung around like a mere ragdoll. She stumbled more and more as her footing was chipped away further and further.

“Hey, master race!” yelled Eva. “Try and keep up!”

~

Miko broke her way into the Prophets’ network intelligence, which they had installed over top of the settlement’s standard logic circuits. Not that they stopped with changing the settlement’s people, but they also installed their own set of Intelligences to help control everything.

They had completely overwritten all of the settlement’s code with their own, and had complete control over everything that happened there. Everything within the network was theirs to manipulate.

Including every Hallowed.

And the only way Miko could even remain inside was to disguise herself as a standard communications instruction command. She pretended to be among the hundreds of thousands of others that issued repeating commands across every node and client in the network.

There, she bounced around from node to node through each set of intelligences, and reaffirmed the same instruction set that all others kept repeating. Those she was able to easily peel open and read. They were Callie’s minimal instructions, simple as they were:

Harm no Prophet

Follow any Prophet’s Commands

Harm all who oppose the Prophets of Gaea

Miko realized the potential of its minimalism. It allowed them to act with greater freedom than normal in order to achieve them. The lack of self-preservation routines meant that the Hallowed could do absolutely anything they needed to do, in service to their instructions.

She also noted that although the code was all easy to read, they were incredibly difficult to modify or remove. The instruction sets alone were protected by anti-tampering code, and if they were disturbed would immediately alert the whole circuit’s Security Intelligence.

She looked up and observed as it monitored every intelligence from up above. It loomed over every circuit like a dark cloud filled with terrible energies. Red arcs of electrical energy danced across its surface, some of which flashed menacingly deep within.

I need to test it first, she told herself.

With that, she surreptitiously deposited one of her worms then bounced into a separate intelligence altogether. From there, she watched as her worm burst open into multiple sparks.

Each one burned their way through lines of code and corrupted their dataset.

But the Security Intelligence, diligent as it was methodical, quickly responded to the threat. It scanned each of the sparks, snuffed them out with cascading rapid-fire attacks, then restored the code they tore apart.

It happened so quickly that Miko was astounded by what she saw.

Truthfully, she was deeply impressed. Whoever had coded the Security Intelligence clearly knew what they were doing. Its protective code was both efficient and effective. But more than that, it’s own self-protective measures and mechanisms were what caused it to stand out.

Every line she looked at was locked behind thousand-digit security keys, which made guesswork impossible for any logic circuit to undo. At least, in any meaningful amount of time. And on top of that, entire blocks were randomized with seven times the standard encryption and translation layers.

Not that it was perfect. While it was focused on ensuring code integrity, it was clear that it had a few memory leaks that she could exploit.

Genius, she told herself. A pity about its flaws.

Regardless of its weaknesses, it wasn’t something she could take on alone, unless maybe she had all the time in the universe.

And for the first time in a long time, Miko wished she had access to a Prometheus Core. Its operating intelligence could easily help her calculate the formulas she needed to defeat it. If she was in a merge, she was certain she could face it head-on.

But that was neither here nor there, and she had no choice but to find another way.

She decided to try out something she had been playing around with for some time. It was a silly thing, and began as a challenge to herself.

A while ago, she was bored enough that she challenged herself to write two programs at the same time. She tried it happily, but failed miserably. But then she took a page from Eva’s book and practiced multitasking to help her meet the two-program challenge.

Eventually, she reached a point where she was able to write two simple scripts at the same time. It was a ton of work, but it made her happy to see such progress.

At the time, she was just toying around with the idea, but now she realized its true potential application.

Miko stilled her mind, then bounced her consciousness between three intelligences within the circuit – Networking, Operations, and Diagnostics. She went between them faster and faster with each passing moment. Each time, she left Mirror Ghosts of herself, merely fractions of a second every time.

Each of her Mirror Ghosts performed a small thing – move this, copy that, rewrite this, remove that, flag immutable, flag temporary. And when each of those actions chained together millisecond after millisecond, she caused utter chaos within the system.

Miko cracked her metaphorical knuckles and dug into the Prophets’ logic circuits while she entered a True Multitasking State. There, her Mirror Ghosts bombarded the entire system hundreds, if not thousands of times per second, and challenged the Security Intelligence to a duel.

Sparks flew as entire swaths of code were randomly replaced and corrupted and removed. The logic circuits’ Intelligences were pulled apart bit by bit and tossed into the ether, as though an impending storm was on its way.