Ravens of Eternity

221 The Patriarch Falls, Pt Freya inhaled deeply and filled her lungs with air, then exhaled it all out calmly. She tightened her grip on the Ra’ventrii blade and twirled it slightly, then began to circle Father with a predatory look on her face.

And as she walked, she activated Ascendant Form and allowed her energy to flow through and around her. She bathed in her own power, her pride evident in every step. She felt satisfied with her strength, of how far she had come, inside and out.

She was proud of what she was able to do, what she was able to face, what she was able to weather.

Freya had truly come a long way from what she used to be – some weak little thing with no purpose. And now, after so much suffering, after so much pain, her life was truly in her grasp.

She instinctively knew that her Ascendant Form was instrumental in that, and it came so easily to her now. Months and weeks and cycles of practice and use allowed her a greater understanding of herself. Through hard work and discipline, she learned how to control her body to the tiniest particle, and so honed it like the blade in her hand.

She vowed to herself that never in a hundred million years would she ever lose that control. Especially not to a self-important, narcissistic, wannabe emperor.

Her life was her own, and belonged to no-one but herself.

Father’s eyes grew wide with admiration as he felt Freya’s energies flow all around her. He felt the shape of it, even as it clashed against his own.

His lust swelled instantly.

.....

“So you’re able to do it, too,” he said. “I knew something was special about you the moment I laid my eyes on you. Amazing! Truly amazing!”

“Even more amazing is that I didn’t need you to figure it out,” she replied. “And I’ll never need anything from you, ever. Except possibly your corpse in the ground.”

Father simply huffed at her and shook his head in disapproval. He was astounded at her

“Don’t be naive,” he said. “We’re clearly a match made in heaven.”

“A pity that’s not where I’m sending you,” she replied.

Freya then shot forward with unrelenting speed, her eyes filled with murder. Father counter-charged with unwavering determination, his eyes filled with desire.

He reared back with a grunt, and swung his fist directly at her head. But he found only air as Freya spun into her dance only moments before.

She stepped to her right and performed a lateral slash inwards. She aimed the tip of her blade at his left abdomen, and whipped her wrist forward to give the cut an extra bit of bite.

Father found her technique incredibly hard to defend against – she was fast and precise and highly practiced. And the dance she employed made it seem as though she was in two places at once. She was like energy, personified.

It was clear to him that she spent her time focusing on building herself, and that only drove his desire further. To him, having that aspect rooted deeply throughout the Family would only help him ascend even higher.

Because of her practiced hand, he just barely blocked her blade with his forearm. He sucked in air through his teeth and seethed in pain as her blade bit into his skin and muscle. He felt its edge scrape right up against his bone, and etched a ridge where it passed.

In the blink of an eye, she spun in the other direction and came down on him with a diagonal slash from above. Waves of murderous intent radiated from her eyes, and her blade became the focal point of that fury.

He blocked her again, but with his other arm instead. And again felt her blade cut through his skin and etch his bones a second time. Pain coursed through him – a feeling he wasn’t used to in the slightest.

Father yelped again and sucked in air through his teeth as he fell back. Pain radiated out of both of the cuts in his arms, and he glared at Freya. Not just for daring to harm him, but for actually doing it.

The sheer audacity of it.

He hadn’t met anyone in his long life that could hurt him this much.

Father’s scowl turned back into a wide grin as he realized that breaking Freya was going to be the most satisfying event of his life. His wounds began to close up even as he imagined all of the things he was going to do to her.

Of how he was going to begin, and how she was going to end.

Freya took a moment to breathe and regenerated some of her stamina. Those attacks had taken a chunk of it away, but she still had plenty in the tank. Or at least, she hoped she had enough to take him down.

Then she narrowed her eyes and charged Father again.

~

Multiple tendrils from Command Intelligence slammed into the Mirror Ghost and shattered it into a million pieces, just like the one before. ComInt withdrew all but one of the tendrils, which it used to inject an override into the logic circuit.

Nearly instantly, the Truesight Engine’s advance inside that circuit slowed down to a crawl. The logic circuit’s Intelligence, inoculated by ComInt, lashed back at Truesight and ripped into its code furiously.

Raijin had taken over more than a third of the logic circuits inside of the Prophet’s base, but was utterly contested in much of the rest. Her Truesight Engine fought against each resistant circuit’s native Intelligence and pushed hard to acquire every node cluster it came across.

Both sides thrashed into each other with relentless fervor, and tore their code apart. However, Truesight’s code integrity was far greater than most other installed Intelligences, and restored itself faster than its opponents could.

Still, it gained ground too slowly, especially with Command Intelligence overseeing everything.

More than that, ComInt’s code was far more sophisticated and much more optimized than Security Intelligence. It was clear to her that the person who built it gave it much more attention than any other Intelligence in the system.

She correctly deduced that the designer was ‘Father’. Clearly only a person who put so much stock into hierarchy would create an Intelligence that lorded over all the others.

While many of the circuits faced their own battles, ComInt lashed out at the Mirror Ghosts that surrounded it. It smashed into them one after the other and shattered them.

But not without being overwhelmed by the others.

Those that remained fired endless streams of code right into its hardened outer shell. The rushing torrent gouged out deep scars across its defensive algorithms and reduced them further and further.

ComInt was completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of attacks it weathered, but it still attacked the Mirrors around it. Albeit slower and slower with each passing second. It flung another dozen tendrils at another Mirror and shattered it.

But it was only moments after that Raijin restored it. She wove through the whole battlefield at blinding speed and rebuilt each broken Mirror piece by piece, one microsecond after another.

She watched as everything was ripped apart and put back together all around her, and realized that she was winning. For now. She also realized that she was still a biological being and could never compete with a digital opponent.

Not in the long run.

As fast and overwhelming as she was, she was beginning to tire out. In contrast, the Command Intelligence could draw on as many system resources as was available to it. And ComInt’s logic circuit was incredibly robust. There was plenty of space for it to expand.

As their fight wore on, it began to absorb more and more of its logic circuit’s processing power. It slowly caught up to Raijin’s speed and threatened her hold over parts of the system.

Worse, her own access to the circuit’s resources were capped. She was technically a system guest, and only had access to so much of the MemVaults. Unlike the settlements which only had a single MemVault, Command Intelligence had over a dozen.

It had control over all of them, while she could only tap into three at any given time.

Her Mirror Ghosts were optimized as much as she could, but even then they took up the majority of her allocated space. She watched as ComInt opened up more nodes and activated a third MemVault for itself.

Circuit pathways lit up all around as Command Intelligence spooled itself up for one big strike.

Raijin decided to retaliate before it could commit its attack, and had all mirrors fire off unending datastreams right into ComInt. Dozens of them struck its obsidian shell and ripped it apart.

Their combined attack revealed portions of the code underneath, which Raijin immediately dug into. She tugged at what code she could see, tore out some lines, and replaced them with her own.

Instead of healing itself, ComInt simply began its attack in earnest. Tendrils shot out in every direction all at once, and slammed into all of Raijin’s Mirror Ghosts. All of them were pierced and shattered on impact. And for a brief moment, all of the logic circuits were clear of interruptions.

Not that Command Intelligence could do anything about it. It was forced to commit all its resources on healing its outer shell and withdrew all of its tendrils instantly.

As Raijin’s Mirror Ghosts shimmered back into position, ComInt’s shell resolidified and hardened into shape.

But the damage was done – she had successfully edited small portions of ComInt’s running commandset. Raijin saw her code as it shone dimly through ComInt’s shell.

Not that any of her code was complex. All she had done for the most part was add multiple halts and pauses to the commands she could see. They were small changes, but they worked absolutely.

Almost every action it made was now slightly slower than before. She grinned as she watched it stitch itself back together, but stopped every thirty microseconds. It was brief, but it was enough.

Command Intelligence lit up once again as it prepared for another all-out assault.

Once again, tendrils shot out in every direction, towards each of the Mirror Ghosts. They slammed into the Redirection Loops, but were completely reflected this time. In conjunction with ComInt’s microsecond pause, every Mirror ghost adjusted their synchronization and utilized that gap.

All they had to do was make sure the gap happened at the same time as the microsecond pause. And that meant that ComIn’t attack completely missed the opening between reflection and deflection states.

The tendrils were thrown right back into the Command Intelligence’s obsidian body, and gouged itself deeply. It shook wildly and withdrew every tendril as it began to stitch itself together. But again, the tiny delays worked against it.

Raijin saw entire swaths of code this time, and when she dove in, completely swapped out entire functions. She leapt back out and watched with a widening grin as ComInt closed itself up.

But then it sat there for too long without doing a thing – for multiple microseconds. It was an eternity when operating within the circuit, and a massive advantage for Raijin.

Inside, ComInt’s commands shot out from node to node and ran through their written functions. But some of the functions simply ended up inside one of a handful of non terminating loops. A statistically significant amount of commands fell into Raijin’s CodeTraps.

There, those commands were stuck for eternity.

Her CodeTraps caused minor delays in processing within ComInt, and compounded the Microsecond Delay. And although each trap was small in nature, it was enough to seriously hamper ComInt on every level.

The beleaguered Intelligence fought hard to keep itself in order. It had noticed that many of its commands never arrived at their destination, and so spat out more and more to keep up. But instead, they ended up within the traps.

There, all they did was cause ComInt to commit more and more system resources to useless processes.

Despite its internal turmoil, it launched another attack, and multiple tendrils shot out again. Like the first time, they tore forward with speed. However, only three fourths of them made it to the Mirrors.

The rest stopped halfway up, and froze in place.

A few simply slowed to a crawl

The three-fourths were deflected back into its body, and tore at the outer shell once again. Entire swaths of code were laid bare for Raijin to dismantle.

And she happily dove in once again, where she caused even more chaos within the core.