12 Miles Below

Book 7. Chapter 5: The war within I

Eight hours prior

To’Avalis watched as the hammer smashed through the human’s fractal wraiths, keeping the pests from causing true damage to To’Orda. The strategy was sound, slowly whittle away the human. He could respect his older brother's tactics there. Methodical was a good word.

Shields wouldn’t save the squishy meatbag within that armor from a direct hit. Everyone watching knew it. Including To’Wrathh.

He expected the human to attempt trump cards soon as the fight grew more feral. What he hadn’t expected was a repeat of prior tricks. But humans weren’t known to be overly clever or with impeccable memory.

In the stream, far more wraiths appeared and swarmed around To’Orda. The human’s melee combat abilities drastically changed in style and pattern in addition to the acasual difference. The obvious change in command between the armor’s user and the armor’s engram was clear.

Keith was using his engram to pilot his armor, and that had one fatal flaw. The thrill of victory surged through his mind, a sense of vengeance and vindication, as well as a feeling of complete superiority. His opponent had merely been a human, an insect at best. Luck could only take the wretched thing so far.

He’d never felt this way about any opponent prior, it had always been cold indifference and planning. They were obstacles to be overcome. Keith was… different. It was personal, for once.

To’Avalis boasted as much over the open comms, giving To’Wrathh a sneak peak of what they planned. Let her suffer and panic for a moment, it would make victory that much the sweeter. He’d take command of To’Orda’s broadband abilities, send the override signal with the exposed administrator access, and the Winterscar's armor would become a glorified coffin.

After that, To’Orda could take all the time he wished to wind up a kill blow. He squashed the immediate idea of killing the human right there and then; planning needed to be done. First, take the human to a far more deserted area, devoid of metal of any kind. And then squash every possible soul fractal in the area before finally killing the human for good. Break down any source of metal, and examine To'Orda's soul fractal afterwards for any signs of the rat.

Even as he spoke the words, leering about it over the comms, he knew there was something off about this. A gut feeling. Instinct.

He didn’t know where it came from. He couldn’t even track down where the source had been. Hunches such as this had never happened before to him. All his plans had always been meticulous and with enough redundancy to correctly predict every action his targets ended up doing.

The human was routinely capable of surpassing those predictions, and surviving past all reasonable doubt. Perhaps that had shaken his sense of confidence built over the few decades of operation he had? And now he had creeping thoughts of failure?

No. Not possible.

He squashed the feeling. He would incapasitate the human, and then have To’Orda drag the pest far from here, where there was nothing that the human could use to escape death with. It was optimal. He readied the administrator codes and connected with To’Orda’s broadband systems.

Fool. A voice floated through his system. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

To’Avalis froze in his tracks, administrator codes a second away from being sent over to Keith’s armor.

What was that?

He went through his memory, but all he found was a feeling of some kind, sourced deep within his soul fractal, twisting and merging with his neurocortex. It hadn’t been words. It hadn’t been anything at all.

His imagination. Or the old shell’s damage had micro-faults due to the amount of repairs he’d had to make. The original destruction had come from a single blade through the head. Easily repaired. Perhaps the followup damage from shockwaves dealt by that blasted warlock may have caused something deeper to break down but not register broken?

To’Orda continued to fight against the human over the live stream, unaware of any thoughts going through To’Avalis’s mind.

The Feather debated for a moment, and decided he’d been cautious his entire lifecycle, it was only fitting to remain this way to the very end. Instead of a direct connection with Keith’s armor, To’Avalis took a few seconds longer to prepare a redundancy. Just in case.

He isolated a subsection of his system, spooling up a sandbox server. From here, he relayed the commands through To’Orda’s systems.

The giant looked over the authorization code, then raised a metaphorical eyebrow back at To’Avalis.

“Just do it.” To’Avalis snapped, the ill feeling making him more aggressive. “We don’t have time to waste.”

“Nnn... fine.” The giant loaf said, and connected the new server to his output comms.

To’Avalis noted the connection was isolated, secured and one to one, and set that way by To’Orda. As if the giant wanted nothing to do with whatever plan this was. It made him more nervous, he wasn’t certain if the old Feather’s instincts were equally on edge and he was already shielding himself from the potential fallout. Or if To’Orda simply didn’t want to know more, because it meant less information to assimilate.

Likely the second.

To’Avalis purged the self-doubting and sent the first sections of code through the sandbox. Nothing happened to the sandbox, all systems remained green. However, nothing happened to Keith’s armor either. The two duelists continued the pitch fighting.

Had the armor systems been updated to patch this vulnerability within the last month?

Not possible.

To’Avalis had researched the human armors extensively. There was only one large scale update to the old human engineering, done by Urs. And that was long before he’d met Tsuya. Without the human goddess’s helping hand, that update had been mostly physical alterations. The software was left nearly untouched, everything shoved behind a single administrator override. Urs was only human. The software behind golden era technology was far beyond what he could have learned in his lifetime.

So there shouldn’t be anything different with Keith’s armor. It was a closed system, with only the Winterscar capable of making edits, and all research he’d done on that particular pest suggested the weasel was skilled with occult and mathematics like Urs had been, not a specialist software engineer.

Humans require time and practice to grow good at anything, unlike Feathers. There was a limit to Keith’s hypothetical abilities between the last time they’d spotted him.

Thus: His armor couldn’t be modified by anyone, except for the human himself. And he couldn’t have modified it with his skillset, even assuming he began learning the inner workings of the armor and modern cybersecurity from the moment To’Avalis lost sight of him.

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Then, why wasn’t the human’s armor shutting down?

That gut feeling returned. Something wasn’t right. He loathed when unexplained, unexpected events happened, and it was happening right now.

Fine. He would investigate the root cause. Perhaps the sandbox wasn’t generated correctly, or the connection through To’Orda was being messed with by the giant loaf himself. He’d been muted prior before, To’Orda was certainly capable of messing things up.

He opened a port into the sandbox, all systems returned nominal.

Then he checked the actual commands and debug messages returned by the armor.

The response was different from his prior experience. Not in the message itself. He spent a few cycles of processing time to verify its integrity and output. The only difference from the prior response message had been in filesize. Larger by a slight amount.

He closed the terminal the moment he detected the discrepancy. He didn’t understand where the bloat had appeared, but a wave of fear and concern seized him right that moment.

The sandbox was shut down and scrapped as To’Avalis retreated to mull things over. There had been a change. The response package was larger in filesize than it should have been, and yet displayed the same data when he’d investigated.

He didn’t know what that meant yet, but it did mean there was some change to the armor system. And that was enough to cause concern.

First, he would need to inform To’Orda and To’Sefit of the failure. His comm systems opened up, and the message was sent.

Nothing came out.

He tried again. Still no word. In horror, he realized the entire system was no longer responding to him. System failures were cascading beyond the comms system and into other parts of his function.

Did I not warn you? A hollow chuckle came out from within him. Better fight for your life now, go on, scurry away little rat.

He didn’t know where that voice of self-doubt was coming from, but he had far more pressing concerns to deal with. The only thing that could cause this much errors and shut down entire modules of his functions had to be some kind of viral weapon.

He immediately went to war, digging trenches and isolating systems. In moments, he tracked down the offender. A massive, growing shadow, lurking in the darkness of his mind. Consuming sections of his systems he hadn’t yet known existed.

How had it managed to infiltrate past his defenses? An exploit within Feathers? Or a leak of some kind that managed to escape containment of the sandbox environment? The moment the sandbox emulator had opened the file, it could have theoretically wormed its way through all the layers of abstraction To’Avalis had placed.

He brought out his own monster, the old protofeather viral weapons he’d downloaded from Abdication's archive. It dove down into the same seas in his mind, hunting for territory and resources to claim and update itself further.

But the damage was done. His comms systems were completely seized, now the very headquarters of the growing infection. His defenses were entrenched, fighting off an attacker that clearly had the same skill and single minded focus that his own protofeather viral weapons had.

The similarity was too eerie. The two weapons were fighting against one another in far too similar methods. Expanding into the millions, mutating organically in response to one another. Moving almost like... like mirrors to one another.

To’Avalis realized he had been infected with the same exact tools he’d just used.

He had his answer then. The armor had been modified. Only a Feather could have access to that virus from the pale lady's most guarded archives. And only one Feather had access to the Winterscar's armor - To’Wrathh.

She’d given her human the strongest viral weapon machine kind knew about. Built by Abdication, the last loyal protofeather, and the first true Feather of their lineage.

And now that monster’s viral weapon of war was within his system, with a head start. The same viral weapon built to kill protofeathers. To’Aacar’s rooted out shell was still only second generation - and those had been mass manufactured, with far less overall power than a protofeather.

To’Avalis was going to die.

Panic took him then, realizing death was a possible result from this misstep. He’d die in silence, gagged with his team none the wiser as the assassin in the dark from five hundred years prior straggled the life out of him.

He unleashed everything he had. And he gave it all permissions possible, with every ounce of processing power. The advantage of starting with the majority of his systems under control was great. But the enemy had a foothold within. And that was the fatal flaw Abdication couldn’t properly defend against.

He needed to fight this creature himself. He looked inward, deep within the soul fractal, and dove through it, back out into the digital sea of his server.

The world turned from bytes and bits, command lines and memory, into a breathing living world. Warped by the occult.

Feet landed hard onto the surface under him. His eyes opened up, taking in the sights.

His inner mind appeared as a frozen landscape, filled with rigid walls and meticulously planned out channels of shallow water, running smoothly despite the freezing temperature around him. Further beyond loomed his fortress heart. The concept of himself, as he saw in his mirror. A rising tower that broke through ice and metal alike.

It was as he remembered it. All except for the slight heat within the water channels around him. A sense of fire and rage bubbling through the circuit-like pathways.

He didn’t have time to examine the occult warped world. He needed to rush to his center, and purge the infestation from the only dimension it could not fight back effectively.

The walls opened around him, letting him through with speed and alacrity. Water channels flowing just under his feet, multiple ones joining together in parallel streams the closer he drew to his heart.

He passed through the gates of the citadel, and within it he witnessed the true effect of the viral weapon.

A winding, organic, flesh-like translucent amagination. Slowly wrapping itself into and out of walls, pillars and prying open doorways. Fighting off against another similar tendril like entity. One red, and one blue.

He supposed the clear cut colors was his own perception of the world marking the enemy.

The tendrils collided into a purple haze, the collision spreading out into veins and venules, recombining chaotically until enough mass was prepared for another attack.

In his hands, the occult whip flashed out, severing tendrils, halting the infection’s spread through the walls. Blue wisps and veins immediately seized the opened territory, spreading out and sealing the section. It didn’t ask or question why the weakness appeared, it moved without hesitation.

Good. He’d made it in time. With his personal involvement, the virus wouldn’t be able to kill him.

His mind expanded outwards, connecting to the walls and very structure of the world. Feeling his own counter-virus in action and bolstering it directly.

Then, he chased down hallways and foyers, slashing across anything that wasn’t under his control. Sections of data that his systems had no true access to were retaken. The virus reacted, almost like a living entity, striking back at his avatar. Digital attacks made to deal with conceptual entities battling from within the occult digital sea, designed by Abadiction.

But for all the cleverness of Mother’s greatest Feather - the virus had no soul. No means to connect to the occult. And without that, its attacks against To’Avalis were limited in scope. Only the acasual could counter acasual.

It was still a dangerous beast.

To’Avalis had no uncertainty that this soulless viral weapon was strong enough to strangle the life out of almost any wild growth program out in the digital sea, even if they had the advantage of souls. A expert combatant would defeat a novice even when blinded, soly by relying on training and technique. But that handicap would be too great to overcome against a skilled enough opponent. And he was a fully realized and conscious entity built for war. That was a different level of skill than wild feral programs out in the distant seas. He wove circles around the virus's attempts to spear his avatar.

Abadiction’s code was a weapon, but weapons needed a master to wield them. Alone, the virus mutated in response, growing far more aggressive as it realized defense was a failing strategy. Calculating optimal ways to deal with something irrational in nature, and finding its options too limited.

Walls were crumbling around him, pillars snapping. Ice breaking off first before the very stone would crumble in place. If the virus couldn’t take and keep control over his systems, then it would destroy it to deny the enemy resources. To’Avalis panicked, slashing away at anything red, demanding his stolen system and body to remain his.

It was working, he was regaining control.

And then a blade rammed through the back of his avatar’s chest midway through clearing one of his hallways.

He coughed, half in surprise, and half in pain. Chain falling from his hand, feet losing power, collapsing onto his knees.

“How?” He choked, “Who?”

There couldn’t be anyone here in his sanctum. There wasn't any other soul capable of--

A pale hand drew close and grasped his shoulder before he could fall downwards. Then, with deliberate intent, it pulled him deeper into the blade, until he felt the very hilt of it dig into his shoulderblades.

A face leaned in, slightly past his ear.

“Greetings brother.” To’Wrathh whispered, her hand tightening on his shoulder with barely restrained fury. “Did you believe yourself safe from me?"