12 Miles Below-Chapter 67Book 8 - - The fight at the heart of the church

It was complete chaos. One moment the citadel was humming on track, the Icon guiding the efforts in optimal directions, everyone moving along without any breaks.

The next moment about ten percent of the entire citadel’s forces were decimated by the ambush.

The Icon’s voice and connection were scrambled, all communications within the fortress between teams ceased, and machines were crawling absolutely everywhere.

Every level, every room, every part of the fortress that was large enough to have a portal opened up, almost everything had multiples spewing forth the machine army.

Everywhere I could see, it was chaos and combat. Feathers moved through each portal, hundreds leading behind them thousands of machines.

To’Avalis hadn’t held back, not even a single second. He came out of the gate swinging with the strongest cards he possibly could throw at us.

We fought back just as hard.

Within the center planning chamber, flanked by knights and dozens of crusaders, along with the chaptermaster himself fighting tooth and nail to survive - the fractal of resolve pulsed through directly from Urs like a beacon of light in the darkness.

It was a thing of absolute might.

The Feathers attacking the command center were thrown backwards, forced down on their knees, or otherwise blasted out of the stained glass window wall further ahead - but Urs was focused on one aspect: Calling forth his dimensional quantum fractal.

It pulsed once, power swarming from the outside inwards until it fully lit to life, connecting a hundred others all calling on the same power. A thousand. A million.

Urs held a tendril out to me, and I grabbed hold, dragging myself and Superior behind into the quantum state.

In one moment, I was connected with an infinite amount of alternate Keiths, each doing the same. And each Keith came with their own Superior.

Godhood called. We were immortal.

And we still nearly got wiped out.

The Feathers here all fought in so many unique and different ways, almost ninety percent of all Keiths all across the parallel worlds were cut down by some bullshit or another that I had no possible means to anticipate or defend against.

Another nine percent had their Urs ripped off their backs and thrown too far apart to remain connected through the quantum state. They fizzled out of existence, chasing after the captured or tossed away husk.

But by sheer luck, a few Keiths managed to randomly move about in just the right order of sequence to dodge spears, slices, grabs, attempts to suck power away, and a few hundred blades swings all coming directly for us within a few seconds.

Not to mention weirder things, like a few dozen Keiths that had moved into the same direction, where reality itself seemed to just crush inwards and then explode out, ripping Urs off our back. There were equally multiple portal-like attempts at simply removing us from the room itself. Unlike the more permanent looking portals being made to assault the room, these attack portals were far more like To'Aacar's and To'Sefit's versions.

Avalis had looked at the full planning document on how to kill, maim, or eliminate us and put a checkmark next to every godsdamned one he could. The only reason he hadn't sent more at this point was likely diminishing returns and sending Feathers with powersets that conflicted with one another. So there was an upper limit to all the scrapshit he'd sent after us.

We gave as good as we got though.

On our end, we had a lot of actual fire, napalm, suspension gel with division fractals, bullets, shaped explosions, and soon a metric scrapton of occult ghosts all dedicated down the quantum paths. Wrath and Father were equally in the same room, and they were just about fury incarnate.

Bullets and firepower came out of us all at once, tackling the enemy. But my occult swarm wasn't quite online yet.

At first, only one or two Keiths for every ten of us was able to get enough breathing room to send their thoughts out and commit to one dimension. And even then, they’d pop out of existence the moment that world’s Keith was killed or lost. Sometimes, the prime Keith would only get a few seconds of help from all the other Keiths.

So that first minute of pure combat were highly lopsided, even with Urs generating his dimensional crossing fractal.

But once we survived the early assassination attempt, we got the hang of it.

Seventeen Feathers had been sent to stab me, all in unique ways, and all of them were completely focused on me above any of the knights and crusaders in the room.

To handle the bodyguards I had, Avalis had equally dedicated a few portals in this room to spit out wave after wave of lessers, all trying to pile themselves onto the knights.

They might have been more detrimental to their own team however, since they did very quickly pile up into almost a wall around us, which gave me breathing room. Even the regular crusaders here, the weakest link we had on our forces, were still Imperial Crusaders of the fifth vow, the elites among elites. Cathida would have been among their numbers at her prime.

And they took on entire armies of lessers as a unified force.

My occult ghosts were far more effective when I had some kind of personal defense going like a wall. Because I could fly them through things and attack from any direction. Having the enemy lessers start piling up as bodies while everyone here formed a sphere around me in defense bought me some breathing room - which meant every other Keith in connection equally had that same breathing room.

It was time to seriously start fighting back.

First, I counted five Feathers that were flying through walls. They had been trying to snatch me non-stop from the very start. And their Keith kill-counts were way higher than any other Feather in the room, which made them the largest threat. They’d probably been picked by Avalis specifically as the most optimal hard counter he could get against me.

Able to fly through fire, walls, obstacles, other knights and even occult power, all to grab me out and throw me into their dimension.

In this case, the answer was my dimensional cape, which I had neatly folded into my bag and could duplicate within all the ghosts.

The moment those Feathers flew through those capes, they’d find themselves back in standard reality, where the knights could properly shoot them with bullets.

Out of the five Feathers that had come for my head, only one survived the division gel and occult bullet combo. And that one was doing so by using an occult dome shield similar to Atius’s own spell.

He’d landed onto the ground, rolled back on his feet, shoved his shoulder forward and a flat wall of power filtered ahead of him, slowing down all the bullets and gels thrown at him.

Seventeen occult ghosts sent by seventeen different Superiors surrounded him instead, flying around the wall to the blind spots the power didn’t protect against, and each ghost held a hand out, generating A01’s spear right into the world here.

He had a half second to calculate the danger and tried to hold off. The Feather rolled on himself into a tight ball, and small spikes of occult blue launched out like he was the center of a shrapnel grenade.

Four of Superior’s ghosts were punched through and vanished.

Six more vanished as the Keith from their dimensions were killed off one after another from other scrapshit happening at the same time, the connection severed. It was rough since for every superior here in the prime dimension, all the subdimensions supporting this one were fighting tooth and nail to survive without their Superior to help.

But seven of the ghosts remained alive long enough to form the spears, brought forth by sheer demand and focus as Superior projected the fractals out of himself.

They each launched that weapon directly at the still spinning Feather. Three missed as the enemy stopped his wild spinning and focused on dodging in the strangest possible way, but the rest slammed into him and ripped the bastard apart. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

The damage that spear could do was impressive. Absolute destruction, they even lanced through the ground downwards after ripping through the Feather's chassis.

He tried to stand back up, massive holes punched into his body, systems clearly failing. And was promptly hacked and sliced into pieces by Wrath flying right past him, blades spinning as if he was just another part of the cleanup she was going through. He was dead before he hit the ground again.

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More Feathers came out of the portals, some attacking even from the safty of the other portal's end instead of fully stepping through.

Everything Avalis had, he sent. Arcs of power cutting through the superstructure. Giant waves of occult vibrating the air itself. Multi-colored lights, lasers, missiles, and thrown occult blades.

The entire command room was also flooded with water all at once, which ruined a lot of my fire based plans - all for one stupid Feather who’s entire gimmick was trying to copy some old human god-of-the-sea, complete with a trident.

He rode in from one portal like a waterfall, surfboarding on top of the wave.

The absolute worst of the lot. But fortunately, nobody here wasn’t equipped with relic armor, so none of us suffocated. And ghosts could move through water without any issue, letting us mostly catch water-boy as he tried to swim past the defenses, and slice him to pieces.

I had a feeling Avalis had sent this one here solely to flood the command center and deprive me of my napalm and fire. The rest of water-boy's kit clearly didn't do much to save him at all.

Without him alive to generate water everywhere, the level started to drop back down, as it splashed out into the hallways in a tidal wave, washing out the dead bodies of the lessers that had since been cut down or shot by the room defenders.

Sure the room was cleared for more attacks, but it had equally been cleared for our side as well. The Winterscar knights here advanced after the tide, surging forward and scything through the enemies, all trying to expand outwards to reach the portals beyond.

I did too, following the lead of Father and Wrath just ahead of me, to the center portal. Once there, I got to see what kind of scrapshit he'd sent.

A variation of To'Sefit's portal fractals it looked like. There were additional concepts within it, of permanence, size, and distance - as in the fractal itself was distant, which was the largest difference between To'Sefit's original versions. Which made it a little hard to seal the portals up given there wasn't anything to shoot or slice through.

I had no idea where he'd managed to find this kind of fractal, but Urs did send a tendril of thought he hadn't seen this kind of power before in his time. So it was a new discovery post-empire.

"Hold. And prepare." Urs sent. And I saw what he was going to do.

Resolve pulsed within him.

Within his mind, the image of the division fractal shaped up. But not just any division fractal. True division. And he'd equally called it to mind at a distance, my hand extended out as if moved by his own thoughts, swiping through the air in front, sweeping the division fractal itself outwards across the portal.

Occult blades could slice through the portals here and cut nothing. They weren't physical objects, they existed purely within the occult as a concept. But true division cut everything including concepts themselves.

The portal instantly winked out of existence the moment the division fractal's concept moved through.

"Talen was far better at this than I was." Urs said, as we turned our attention to the rest of the portals, all being held by different knights, attacking the enemy right as they passed through. "The emperor at his strongest could summon hundreds of these fractals within the air all around, and move each independently, often dozens of feet away from himself."

He sure sounded like destruction itself. The mental image of a god walking with division fractals manifesting in the air around by his sheer demand was troubling.

"Yes it is." Urs agreed with my thoughts. "Bring me closer to each portal and I can seal them."

He could only do one division fractal at a time, accidentally failing to imagine that fractal with an element of range outside the mind would mean spawning the concept of division itself directly within a head. Which would end with us dead.

"Might have a better option." I said, as we approached the next portal. Close enough I could lance out a tendril of pure soul out into the world, and wave it around until I could somewhat connected to the concept of the portal ahead of me.

There I sunk my hooks in and focused on doing what I did best: Mess with things and causing explosions.

The portals were rather delicate, any change in setting or defaults within it caused them to wink out of existence. Even just touching the concepts themselves seemed to cause instability.

Which meant fineness wasn't required, and so every Winterscar knight here could equally do the same thing I did. I sent instructions, and they got to work. Portal after portal within the command center being sealed off as each knight reached close enough to it they could grab hold with a soul tendril out.

As more of the enemy Feathers were thinned out, cut off from the reinforcements, I had less to dodge and protect against, which let me really focus on one dimension and flood it with every other Keith into the same room.

We erupted into a small army of ghosts, and finally overwhelmed both the lessers and the struggling Feathers. The ghosts by themselves from my own mind would act as distractions, while those controlled by Superior would fire off spears that ripped the Feathers apart. Even if Superior could generate as many ghosts as I can, he could only fully fire one spear at a time with all his focus, so there were a lot less of his ghosts firing spears but it worked out.

I was the numbers, he was the damage.

Some struggling Feathers survived longer than others based on how their power sets handled the combined might of bullets, knights, crusaders, Fathers, Wraths and the Keiths. But not a single one of them survived the full weight of all of us hitting harder and harder with less distractions to go around.

The entire fight had taken four minutes in total before we killed the seventeen original assassins, the additional Feather reinforcement waves stepping through portals to assist, the hundreds of Lessers that had made it - and then finally shut the portals off themselves.

The actual number of times To’Avalis had managed to kill me was technically in the infinite numbers, so it was easier to think of it as percentages. For every Keith that was alive, it had cost a few thousand Keiths to make it that far in.

But that was us at our weakest. When every Keith was so pressed against the fight, they couldn’t spend much thought into helping any other dimension. Now that we could, the tide changed.

Literally speaking too, since the water levels had finally fallen down to more a small puddle, all spread out in the hallways, falling down stairs and causing a lot of electrical faults.

I imagine Avalis had left that one to show up later in the fight because a flooded room would have slowed a few other Feathers out there and probably caused some infighting.

And water-boy did wipe the room clear of the dead lessers in his path, which had opened up the way for the Feathers behind him whose powersets weren’t conflicting with water everywhere.

“I really underestimated that asshole.” I muttered, stepping past the dead bodies everywhere. A lot of Crusaders had been killed in this one attack, mostly just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

My heart goes out for them, I’ve died a few thousand times too now, and this dimension was one of the better ones where a few of the Crusaders had managed to make it to the end.

But quite a few were already standing back up from the brink of death as Wrath flew from body to body, the pulse of her healing fractal turning on at each one. If they were even holding onto life by a hair, they were brought back.

More than half the crusaders that had been fatally cut were standing back up, some swapping out broken armor parts from those who didn't make it, all trying to remain as combat ready as possible. If they were rattled by their near death experience, I don't think a single one cared.

“We survived.” Father said. Even he hadn’t come out of this ambush without some damage. A few dimensions had seen his shell hit hard enough it no longer functioned, and I had to abandon those quickly since the loss of Father was too hard of a blow on the war efforts.

But, tough bastard that he was, not a single dimension had seen him actually completely killed.

The man could exist on pure spite outside his soul fractal and then dive into other fractals out there. Killing him would require some extremely niche occult abilities that Avalis hadn't brought out yet.

Chaptermaster Titus had equally managed to live through this, and only because he moved way faster than most of the Crusaders here. Him and his two bodyguards were Imperitors, and were trained to move as fast as the winterblossom technique. The only caveat with the imperial version of that is that they were locked within their armors forever after, their actual bodies invalids.

It didn’t seem to bother Titus, and had come in great use here. He stood back up, letting go of a dead machine, before turning his head our way. “Connection with our Icon has been severed, Emperor Urs. All communications outside this command center is cut, and I suspect the same is happening through the entire fortress. Without guidance, the men can only rely on their own training and prior directions. I trust they will make good judgements and hold the line for the moment, but I believe we need all advantages we can take.”

"We must eliminate the source of the jamming." Wrath summed it up, eyes looking around, likely tracking down where it was coming from.

The answer was everywhere.

Urs blinked. “It seems enemies were not the only danger brought into the citadel. The sources are appearing from each room, not a single source.”

And in the soul sight, as I searched for engineering concepts, I saw our targets: Quite literally carried in by the lessers and Feathers through the portals, these blocks of portable machine tech were broadcasting counter jamming signals that were scrambling everything in the Citadel.

We were cut off from everyone, even at the very heart of the church.

“Of course he’d bring his entire base into our base.” I sighed, “This is To’Avalis. I’d bet he’s moved his entire command center right into our own, just so he could pump out slightly faster instructions.”

“Our first objective will be to eliminate all jamming machines.” Urs said.

“If I can interface with one directly, I may be able to study it and generate a counter-wave signal.” Wrath said. "We need to recover one."

"As the Feather states." Urs said, "Execute her instructions."

The remaining crusaders gave a deep salute, and so to did Titus and his two bodyguards, all forming up by my side. The Winterscar knights here and Father all equally came into formation.

It seemed like a moment to give a quick speech, even with the sounds of screaming and fighting coming from every direction. And I could tell Urs was suddenly starting to feel extremely nervous, having sensed the same thing.

"Keith, please give an appropriate speech." Urs politely requested. Which was a bit of an honor given he'd usually handed that off to Titus.

“The party’s started early." I started, clearly lacking the refined words imperials would throw around here. But we were a little short on time, so they'll just have to make do. "Our job is to clear the house, and let the Icon take charge again. With her commanding the defense, we’ll make it. Remember, we’re not here to hold territory. The citadel, the fortification, all the history here - none of it matters in the grand scheme. We are here for one reason only: Talen. And the moment he’s here, we no longer have any need to remain within these walls, when the real fight is up there.”

The rest of the team here gave quick nods, ready in action.

But more importantly, there was one more thing to all this: We were fighting To’Avalis as the enemy general. And I know how he thinks.

“There is hope. And I see a clear end to all this. It’s been nine hours since the signal that gathered humanity together. If the machines are launching now instead of continuing their preparations, it means they’re out of time.”

To’Avalis would have prepared up until the very last possible second. He wouldn’t have launched his assault here unless he was fully ready… or had no other choice but to attack early.

“To the machines, this must be the very last second. Because Talen is coming.

And he will be here soon.”