Ravens of Eternity

392 Thanatos Rises, Pt While Amarok ripped through half of the security team, Freya leapt forward and directly assaulted the other half.

She drew her Ra’ventrii blade and cut through the closest heavily armored security agent in a single swipe. Freya then spun to the left and cut down another agent with equally ease. With a heavily practiced step, she entered her Cyclone Stance and cut down a third, then a fourth, then a fifth.

Each time she spun and stepped and moved, she bit deep into each of her targets. Sometimes she cut off an arm, or a leg. Sometimes, she sliced open their chests with a single swipe. And regardless of her opening move, she finished each of them off by slicing their necks and lopping off their heads.

Near her, Amarok took apart her half of the security team with equal ease. Though instead of practiced movements, she dismantled them with animalistic ferocity.

Keres squad could only watch in utter amazement as the two of them cut down their opponents in a matter of seconds. And in melee, no less. A few glanced down at their weapons and wondered why they were even there in the first place.

Once the two were done, this section of the passageway had been covered in blood. The bodies of the security team had been torn to shreds, some more violently than others.

Freya slid her beltknife back into its scabbard, commanded everyone to continue the assault, then led everyone further down the passageway.

As they ran, she turned to Amarok, who was now covered in blood.

“Why’d you come with me,” she said. “You really oughta be back with the Republic. This... isn’t your fight. You shouldn’t be here, bloodying yourself for this.”

.....

“You’re wrong,” Amarok replied telepathically. “This is my fight, too. You weren’t the only one who felt Lucifer’s soul get wrenched away and taken into an endless darkness.”

Freya’s face scrunched up as Amarok spoke to her. It wasn’t just words that filled her mind, but the latent emotions that came with those words. Emotions that Amarok felt right then and there.

And they matched her own emptiness, along with the fire that attempted to fill it.

“We three joined from the time that you rescued me,” continued Amarok. “And that is a bond that can never be broken. Yet it has been, forcefully. We both feel Lucifer’s absence deep inside, and it has been replaced by the need to rip and tear and shred.

“Those drogar just now – I poured every ounce of that destructive desire into them. But it did not sate these needs. Did yours?”

Freya could only shake her head in response. Killing those few was far from enough to satiate her bloodlust. A part of her wondered how many it would take. Hundreds? Thousands? Millions?

Something told her that numbers were never going to be a factor.

And it dawned on her that it was best that the both of them left the Republic. Both of them felt a deep, driving, primal thirst that would have driven the Republic to ruin.

“I get it,” she said. “This is our future now.”

“It is worse than that,” Amarok replied. “What will happen to the other if either of us falls? If we feel this much disharmony from Lucifer’s absence, what if either of us joins him?”

Alarm swept through Freya at the very thought. Feeling this much despair and destruction was already more than she could bear. From the moment Lucifer died, it felt as though the weight of the entire galaxy pressed down on her chest.

She felt that losing Amarok would be, as she said, soul crushing.

“All the better that we’re here and not with the Republic,” she eventually said. “And if that ever happens, that we lose each other, then the closer we are to the enemy, the better. They can take the full brunt of whatever comes.”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Amarok.

The ship shuddered under their feet as they ran. There was a loud hum, then all of the lights in the passageways lit up. It caused all of them to slow down and stop as they took note of what was going on.

And then, numerous thick security doors slid closed in every passageway and intersection in the entire devastator. They locked shut with magnetic CLACKS and ensured that they couldn’t be forced open.

Freya ran up to the closest one and banged on it in irritation. Equally frustrated and angry at having been contained so easily, some in Keres squad cursed loudly. One even kicked at a security door.

Of course, it hardly budged.

“I can turn into lightning and move ahead,” Amarok said. “I can find a technician perhaps, and force them to undo this.”

After a moment of thought, Freya shook her head in disagreement.

“No, wait,” she said. “We were headed to the bridge to power the ship to begin with. So it’s good for us that they powered it on themselves... Instead of trying to take it over from there, we can try from here instead. What’s the difference, right?”

“We’ll keep watch,” Amarok replied.

Freya nodded, then sat down on her knees samurai style and shut her eyes. Under Amarok’s watchful gaze, she opened herself up telepathically, and reached outward with her consciousness. She followed Lucifer’s last few moments and spread herself out across the ship.

As she did so, she felt Amarok’s own powerful mind next to hers, then the minds of the Keres Infiltration squad nearby. The more she reached out, the more she sensed the others on the ship.

She felt the minds of the Thunderbolt squadron, or most of them anyway. It seems a couple of them had become casualties to the relentless drone onslaught. Freya also felt the minds of dozens of drogar, all of whom were scattered all over the ship.

There were some in the passageways near them. Others were in engineering, and in security, and on the bridge.

Most importantly, she felt the ship itself. Or at least, the myriad parts that made the ship more or less whole. Like Lucifer, she quickly realized that it was like an empty shell of a body that begged for a mind. The only thing that came close to an actual mind was the Operating Intelligence, an soulless codeset that merely spewed out commands.

As she slipped into the ship’s systems and modules, she also blocked out every other Intelligence’s commands. There was hardly a need for any of them, not if she was going to act as the devastator’s ‘mind’.

Not only that, however, but the more she took command of the ship’s systems, the more she felt the pain that emanated from them. Each of its systems felt like they were constantly getting jammed by needles.

As her consciousness filled the devastator, the pain it felt filled her.

Her body seized up from the sheer amount, and at the same time a tremor swept through the ship. Despite the pain, the two of them synchronized as Freya furthered their dark communion. She was unable to withstand all of the pain that wracked her, and she subconsciously poured the energies of Ascendant Form into her body.

As she did, so too did the devastator.

Its own demimatter and exothermic generators flooded its nodes and batteries with energy, and coursed through every circuit and system.

Freya then numbed the ship’s pain receptors, slowly and carefully at first. Though she couldn’t get rid of it all, she was able to reduce it down to a dull ache. It was plenty enough for her to get to work.

Her vast experience using Prometheus certainly helped as she scoured the devastator’s myriad systems. It was far and away more complex than Raijin’s Oni Core, but found that it was easy enough to translate and understand.

Each of the ship’s modules and systems had an inherent genetic purpose. Though she couldn’t read any of those lines as easily as Azrael could, she knew enough to figure out how they worked. Or at least, how they worked in conjunction with the rest.

And if there was something she couldn’t fully grasp, she allowed her Tiamat’s Transcendence to guide her the rest of the way.

As her mind and body synced up with the devastator, as she learned all of its systems and subsystems, she came to understand that every part of the ship was directed by an ingrained anger and fury. That those elemental emotions were baked into the ship itself.

She immediately felt a kinship with the devastator and understood its need to destroy.

The dozens of drogar technicians inside were utterly astounded at what was going on around them. Their tools and sensors simply stopped working and stopped communicating with the ship. Any terminals they were plugged into had booted them out or were otherwise completely unresponsive.

No matter what they did to restore control, none came.

They were equally astounded when the ship’s internal defense systems activated. Numerous antipersonnel turrets popped out of the ceilings and floors, aimed quickly at any drogar around, and fired.

One by one, the technicians and engineers and security personnel were killed by the ship they built and protected. And one by one, every drogar lifesign on the ship vanished and winked out.

At the same time, every open hangar bay on the ship slid shut and cut off any further drone reinforcements. On top of that, numerous previously deactivated defensive turrets inside the hangar bay powered on and fired disintegration beams at any drones.

This allowed the Thunderbolt squadron to quickly tear into whatever drones were left and mop up as best they could.

Freya stopped in her tracks as she disseminated the ship’s systems further, as she dug deeper into their operational cores. As she pulled away the layers, she found traces of Godeater in them. Their cellular structures were steeped in its energies.

She realized that every Imperial ship was literally powered by Godater’s limitless void.

She wondered why Lucifer came into contact with it in the first place, when ze had communed with the Imperial battleship. And now she knew why.

Previously, they had believed that the modules and systems were transformed from pupa to adult through chronogravitonic energy. Basically, they thought that the drogar bombarded them with time, and advanced the aging process.

But now Freya saw the reality. They bombarded the pupa with some kind of energy derived from Godeater. Perhaps a synthesized version of it. And it actually imbued them with Godeater itself.

Even the demimatter generator held those same energies deep in its core. Just minute amounts all told, but it was more than enough for Freya to see and feel.

It occurred to her that both the Federation and the Empire both had created machines of war using Godeater. Or some derivation of it. Who knows how many weapons they had developed because of it.

And if both of the major galactic nations did it, then it wasn’t a stretch to believe that the Hegemony did as well.

Hell, the Corvus Republic certainly dabbled.

For all they knew, Godeater was already everywhere, and there was nothing they could do about it.

In the past, Freya would have been horrified to come to that realization. But now, in her current state of anarchic retribution, she practically welcomed it.

And as she did so, the familiar chill of a deep void approached her. It surrounded her, and wrapped around her on every dimension, which caused her and the devastator to shudder.

Godeater had come to say hello.

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