Ravens of Eternity

224 The Patriarch Falls, Pt Freya exhaled as she charged straight towards Father, who charged back in exchange. The two of them met in the middle, where their energies clashed against each other.

Father slammed downwards with a steely fist and smashed into the marble, because Freya had leapt up at the last moment and spun in the air. She swung laterally with her blade, and slashed him right across his eyes.

Blood and watery fluid flew out as his eyes were sliced apart, painfully.

He screamed in pain and clutched at his face, completely blind. And as the gashes stitched themselves closed, Freya leapt up again and delivered a devastating back kick into his chest.

He lashed out with powerful swings, even as he fought to retain his balance. One of his hands swatted Freya and threw her aside with great force. She smashed into the ground a half dozen meters away.

But she pushed aside the pain and launched into a dance, even as her mouth trickled blood. She spun around him with blinding speed and slashed at him with powerful strokes. Her blade bit deep into his skin every time, whether he blocked her with an arm, or she hit her intended target.

After a series of vicious attacks, Freya fell back to let her stamina regenerate. She used up a great deal of her energy, and was panting heavily. Her shoulders heaved up and down with every breath.

“I’ll make you a deal,” she said in between breaths. “You lie down and die like a man, and I’ll make sure to make it as painless as possible.”

She watched as Father’s wounds closed up even while she spoke. As she suspected, he healed slowly. In fact, slightly slower than before. Either she had done more damage, or he began to run out of stamina himself.

.....

And though their breaths were both heavy from exertion, his were much calmer than hers.

It was clear that he was incredibly practiced, far more than she was. She realized that he could likely run Ascendant Form any time he wished, for as long as he wanted. She simply had to assume that he didn’t have a time limit like she did.

Which meant her only recourse was to do a catastrophic amount of damage to his body.

This meant she didn’t have time to play around. This truly was a fight she needed to end, and quickly.

She took in a deep breath, then poured all of the energy she had left into herself. Her whole body tensed up for just a moment, then shot forward with breakneck speed. She moved at near the speed of light and was but a blur to everyone else in the room, even Father.

Freya spun into a devastating dance all around him, and slashed her blade across his body dozens of times. Like with Orsethii, she cut into his muscles and tendons from his wrists to his armpits to his heels.

Everywhere.

To Father, it felt as though he had faced off against a blizzard – one whose sharp winds truly bit deep. Instead of ice and snow, this blizzard held razor-sharp metal. No matter where he looked, all he saw was the glint of her blade, followed by a torrent of bright red blood.

The pain dug into him from every angle, all around his body, and the frustration welled inside him.

He let it all out with a resounding roar that knocked everything in the room back. The force of it was more than enough to cause Freya to stumble and slow her dance. And that was the only opportunity he needed.

He lunged straight at her while she recovered, and swung his fist with all of the force that he could muster.

To his utter surprise, she hopped to the side with a grin, spun inwards, then thrust her blade right into his chest.

He felt the blade as it cut through his skin and punctured his chest cleanly. He felt it scrape up against his bone, all while its tip pierced his heart.

With a push, Freya cut all the way through his heart, severed his spine, and slid the tip out his back. She then pushed her blade hilt-deep into Father’s chest. His blood spurted out his back as more of the blade slid from out of it.

Plastered on his face was a mix of utter surprise and awe, as though what he was seeing was impossible. But it quickly shifted to one that was filled with triumph and arrogance as though what he was seeing was exactly what he wanted.

And with the blink of an eye, Father’s hand snapped forward, jabbed Freya in the throat, and then immediately wrapped his fingers around her neck.

Freya choked as her breath was interrupted, and her windpipe was squeezed.

Her hands immediately went up to his, and tried to prise his fingers apart, and get more air flowing through her neck. But it was like trying to bend titanium plating... And as her vision began to narrow, she felt her body get lifted into the air.

“Your little strategies are pitiful,” said Father, “and far too easy to predict.”

He pulled the Ra’ventrii blade out of his chest, slowly, then tossed it aside carelessly. It clattered on the marble floor close by.

Father looked straight into Freya’s eyes as her strength ebbed. The lack of air slowly sapped whatever energy she had left in her. At the same time, his wounds closed up and sealed themselves, faster than ever before.

It was as though he had never been wounded at all.

~

Azrael stood on a slightly elevated platform in the very middle of the Cloning & Education zone. There, she had a great view of all of the pods that surrounded her. And all around her on the platform were multiple terminals, each one a mere step or two away from the others.

While she worked up there, Xylo and Claire walked between the rows of pods and kept an eye out for trouble. The zone was separated into multiple hexagonal rooms filled with the pods, with simple sliding doors in between.

They were in the central room, and so had six ways in and out. Not that they had much to worry about. They had since wiped out all of the Prophets in the entire zone, and sealed up any doors that led out from the hallways surrounding.

And with Raijin’s help, locked down their zone completely.

Still, it was a good idea for them to stay alert, especially while Azrael’s full attention was on the regeneration pods.

Azrael herself felt overwhelmed by it all. There were hundreds of pods in the zone, most of which were assigned to specific Prophets.

As she pored through the main terminal, she went through its operational history and command logs. After reading dozens of entries, she came to realize that every single Prophet was little more than a test subject.

They were Father’s literal genetic playthings, and absolutely nothing stopped him from doing whatever terrible things he had done.

Grief pierced her as she dug deeper.

At the same time, she realized that she herself wasn’t enough. There was too much information, too many records, too many Prophets.

And so, she activated her Medical ServoDrone – the one she and Raijin put together for her use. Unlike the hovering MedGun drones they sold to colonial doctors, hers were instead ovular pods that strapped to her armor’s shoulder blades.

Back there, they simply sat against the armor itself. But once she activated them, the pods opened up and mechanical arms folded out and extended from inside.

They looked frail and spindly, but were in fact composed of a hardened titanium alloy that was tuned specifically for medical procedures. Each of the arms terminated into sharp talon-like tips which were actually a titanium nanite swarm.

The tips acted like a sort of liquid metal, and morphed into whatever medical tool Azrael required them to be – injectors or forceps or scalpels. Anything at all.

Not only that, but each pod housed compartments filled with nanites, medicines, painkillers, and biocells. Everything Azrael needed to heal the wounded.

Not that she needed them for any patients for the time being. For now, she simply needed them to help her with her current task. The two arms stretched out like featherless wings, and reached towards multiple terminals around her.

Their tips blunted and softened as they tapped on the screens that surrounded Azrael.

Her drone worked the ancillary terminals as she continued to focus on the primary one in front of her. They worked in tandem and performed shutdown procedures on every job in the regeneration queue. Together, they halted every print process and canceled all of the hypnotic rewrites currently underway.

Any memory uploads were also stopped and reverted – the last thing they needed was for more Prophets to be activated and reawakened while she worked.

It only took her the better part of a minute to shut everything down, and she accomplished it all cleanly. And with a few quick swipes and taps, rendered the entire zone silent.

All they could hear was the humming of the life support systems that kept the pods running, and their contents alive.

Azrael stood amidst the silence and stared at the records on the terminals that surrounded her. The names of hundreds of Prophets filled them, each and every single one a victim of their so-called Father.

And she knew she couldn’t just let them be. Her heart beat heavily in her chest as she imagined the pain that they had endured through their many lives.

“I can undo this,” she said. “At least, I gotta try.”

She told herself that she could, at the very minimum, end their suffering if she failed. Not that she aimed for that. She wanted to rehabilitate them as best she could. She wanted to give them back their lives.

Azrael vowed that she wouldn’t rest until she achieved what she wanted.

She and her drone then went back to the terminals around her, and switched them out of their reporting mode. Instead, she entered their editing and analytical modes, then brought up Callie on every single one of them.

If she was going to start healing the Prophets, it may as well be with her.

She brought up Father’s meticulous notes on the main terminal and pored through them in great detail. At the same time, one of her arms reviewed all of the changes made to Callie’s genetics, and listed out every edit made since the beginning.

On the other side, her other arm did the same, but with her memories. It marked off every instance of her conditioning all along her timeline, and attempted to highlight any moment that was truly her own.

Azrael then slid the main terminal to the side and activated the holographic workbench underneath it. It hummed as it displayed a strand of DNA, along with a bin full of nucleobases.

She glanced over to her side, reviewed the latest changes that were made to her genetic coding, then began to reverse-engineer most of what Father had done. And though the changes were clear-cut, it was a wholly difficult process for her.

They only touched on genetic engineering at the academy, and since she never specialized in it, never entered the advanced courses. Still, she had a working knowledge, and could make simple edits. It would have to make do, at least for now.

And as she went through all of the versions that Callie was put through, Azrael saw just how much had been changed. Many lines of genetic code had been greatly altered, some irrevocably so.

It was as though whatever was patched out was too horrible to remember. Too offensive to simply retain any record of their existence.

But whatever changes she could undo, she did. Happily. She reached in and pulled out the intrusive nucleobases, tossed them aside, then put in what was originally there. Sometimes the changes were small, almost minor.

Other times, they were sweeping. She imagined that Father had come across some sudden inspiration and edited multiple parts of her identity all in one go. As though he was a painter who had suddenly received divine inspiration.

And she could barely understand the changes herself. Some, she figured, were centered around the girl’s longevity, physical strength, intelligence, and so on. Others, she simply couldn’t understand. She didn’t have the knowledge to even make a guess.

There were also times when she attempted to restore some genetic sequences, but the system alerted her to the dangers of the action. More often than not, they were genetic diseases that were erased and corrected.

And so, she left those edits in place.

In essence, she left as many beneficial edits as she could, and hoped she didn’t screw anything up in the process. The last thing she wanted to do was create some sort of mutant out of Callie’s genetic soup. The girl had suffered enough already.

She estimated that she would be able to restore Callie to most of her original self, even though she had only touched and restored only a very small portion of her genetics. But that much gave her hope.

If she could give the girl back most of her life, she believed that she could do it for the rest of them. Azrael then doubled down on her promise to the Prophets, that she would bring them out of their current hell.

Even if it took her years to accomplish.