The Machine God

Chapter 218 - The Convergence of Wills, Pt. 7

Chapter 218

The Convergence of Wills, Pt. 7Everything went dark.

Alexander shot upward like a cork released underwater. His second mental thread caught the problem before his conscious mind registered it, recalibrating the oscillating waves of Metallokinesis that kept him aloft. The upward force that had held him steady against Earth’s gravity was suddenly meeting far less resistance. The correction came fast, a subtle shift in frequency and amplitude, and he stabilized less than a dozen feet higher than he’d been a heartbeat ago.

His conscious mind caught up to the implications a second later, though it didn’t come with an answer.

Electrokinesis still flooded his Core, sharpening every sense. His eyes adjusted instantly, pulling detail from what little light remained. It wasn’t total darkness. Faint silver light fell from above, cast by two small, irregular shapes hanging in an unfamiliar sky. Neither was the moon. Both were too small, too close to the horizon, and looked a little too much like potatoes.

Below, the Northern Shield’s barriers still pulsed with their steady glow, casting the huddled survivors in pale light. Intermittent flashes strobed across the grounds as powers discharged in the dark. Hjordis’s wings carved a line of fire across what was now a sky full of wrong stars.

The air also felt wrong. Too cold. Too thin. And it tasted strange.

Screaming erupted from below. The survivors, already terrified, had been plunged into near-total darkness. He could hear them colliding with each other, stumbling over chairs, voices rising in panic that had nothing to do with the infected.

“I felt it.” King’s voice came from nearby, barely above a whisper. “There was so much. Too much power.” His words were slurred. “I grabbed too much. Was only trying to move the palace. I didn’t mean...”

He trailed off. His eyes rolled back, and he began to fall.

Titanic moved with surprising speed. One hand caught King by the back of his armor and swung him over his shoulder in a single motion. The other came around in a backhand that connected with a massive spike of blood that had been driving upward toward King’s falling body.

The spike shattered on impact. Blood sprayed across the dark sky in a wide arc, droplets scattering.

Alexander ignored the spike rising for him. He’d already calculated its trajectory, and his two shield drones slid into position, their curved wedge-shapes orienting between him and the incoming threat. Their orange barriers flickered to life, and the spike slammed into them, splattering harmlessly against the energy field.

He swept his gaze across the grounds below, trying to make sense of the chaos. Droney had the drones under control. He had bigger problems to solve.

The blood was alive. That’s how the Lost Prophet was hiding. He could feel it now that he knew what to look for.

Every pool, every smear, every droplet that had gathered in the cracks and craters of the shattered terrace was moving. But not independently. It was one entity.

Tendrils rose from the marble like grasping fingers, reaching for the nearest living body. Spikes erupted in clusters, targeting the defenders at every point of the perimeter. A wave of it surged against the Northern Shield’s barriers from below, translucent surfaces flaring bright as they absorbed the impact.

The Northern Shield himself danced across the air, spear thrusting out almost faster than Alexander’s enhanced sight could track, fine beams of energy lancing from the tip, countering the bloody attacks.

Another tendril whipped toward Annie’s legs as she spun, some instinct warning her of the threat she could barely see in the dark.

All across the battlefield, the blood was attacking everyone who wasn’t already dead.

There were too many problems. But he could solve one of them. Alexander’s intent crossed the bond faster than he could word it. Droney’s processor translated, then repeated the order.

Every drone on the field lit up like disco balls.

White light exploded across the grounds. Harsh and blinding, but throwing everything into sharp relief. The terrace. The wreckage. The people. The infected. And the blood, writhing across every surface like a living thing.

And beyond it, Dubai spread out in every direction, dark against an alien sky. The familiar skyline of towers and spires remained, but they were all unlit. The Burj Khalifa rose in the distance like a black needle against the stars, its famous facade dead without the sun to give it life.

Then the city began to wake.

Street lamps flickered on as automated sensors registered the sudden darkness. One block. Then another. Then a chain of them tracing a highway into the distance. Windows began lighting up, one at a time at first, then faster, as people found switches or cast illumination with their phones.

Alexander could imagine the people stumbling in the sudden darkness, reaching for light switches or for loved ones, not understanding what was happening.

How could they when even he himself was still coming to terms with it.

Across the city, flashes revealed superhumans locked in combat, strobing between the towers. The infected were everywhere. Fighting in the dark, throughout a city that had no idea it was no longer on Earth.

That was the only conclusion that made sense.

Because the world beyond the city, where the lights ended and the buildings gave way, the landscape that stretched on to the horizon didn’t belong to any world Alexander had ever seen.

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And it was cold and harder to breathe. Both were things that hadn’t bothered him in a long time now.

“We’re on Mars.” Talia’s voice sounded across the comms. Even her composure had cracked. “Those are Phobos and Deimos.”

Silence fell over the channel for several heartbeats.

“Fucking hell, Alex!” Maximilian growled.

Raelene cut in. “No! This is exactly what we needed. With this much distance, the infection on Earth stops spreading. He can’t possibly maintain it from here.”

“Tell that to the speedster who can’t run!” Cash snapped. “I keep taking off.”

A voice from below rang across the battlefield.

“I can’t hold the shields much longer!”

The Northern Shield’s power was barely holding, the individual barriers wrapping the civilians beginning to flicker as blood pressed against them, testing for weak points. The strain of maintaining dozens of them while fighting was tearing through the man’s reserve.

Alexander turned. “Auggy!”

“On it,” Augustus said on comms.

He floated above the stage, his flying spell advanced enough now to manage basic levitation with directional control.

“Arcane Warden.”

The spellbook materialized in front of Augustus, snapping open as the pages blurred in a rush of parchment and arcane script before coming to a stop. Blue light coalesced above the tome, forming a miniature render of the palace grounds. It showed barriers, bodies, blood, defenders, all captured in the projection.

Augustus swept his wand across the miniature. Everywhere it passed, the Northern Shield’s flickering barriers lit up, layers forming beneath them, echoing the primary shield with duplicates shimmering into existence in an instant.

The Northern Shield gave Augustus a sharp nod, then turned his spear on the next attacker.

Alexander threw himself sideways, Metallokinesis wrenching his body through the air as three more spears of blood erupted from below, punching through the space he’d occupied a moment earlier. He rolled with the motion, corkscrewing around two more, close enough that some of the blood spattered across his gauntlet.

Coming out of the roll, he turned his focus to the next problem.

“Max.”

Maximilian looked up at him from where he stood. Chains threaded across the battlefield, each one wrapping and restraining an infected body.

Alexander had watched Maximilian’s solo combat challenge more times than he could recall. He’d studied the moment when the Dragon Lord bound a dying saurian’s escaping soul in chains of manifested metal, golden light struggling against its captor.

His chains could bind even what shouldn’t be possible to bind.

Perhaps that was why he was holding on so hard. If anyone could save the infected after this was over, it was someone capable of reaching beyond the physical to whatever the vampire’s blood had done.

But a choice needed to be made.

“You need to get the Lost Prophet away from the people,” Alexander said.

Maximilian’s jaw tightened. He swept his gaze across the battlefield. Then back up.

Alexander met his eyes across the chaos.

“It’s the living or the dead.”

Maximilian’s expression went flat. His eyes narrowed.

But to his credit, he didn’t hesitate.

Maximilian raised a hand. And clenched his fist.

Every chain on the battlefield tensed at the same time. Infected bodies jerked violently as the links tightened and tore through flesh and bone with a sound Alexander knew he would never forget.

Dozens of bodies came apart simultaneously. Blood poured from the corpses, rushing to rejoin the entity spread across the ground.

It didn’t get far, immediately restrained by the chains still wrapped around it. The blood thrashed and pulled, trying to slip free to merge with the greater whole, but the chains held.

Because Maximilian could see it now. Could see what the blood really was. And his power didn’t care that it was liquid or alive or something in between.

The Dragon Lord’s chains bound what he could see. He opened his hand, then closed it again, harder.

The chains erupted outward from the dead, spiraling across the battlefield, stabbing for every pool and smear and tendril of blood. Wherever the chains struck, they bound, wrapping around and squeezing the blood.

The Lost Prophet struggled against the chains. Spikes that had been lancing toward heroes collapsed as they were seized at the base. The wave of blood pressing against the Northern Shield’s barriers lost its force, falling back, caught in a web of conjured chains that dominated the marble terrace.

Alexander spotted Julia below, tangled in a fight against three infected. Two of them clung to her arms, dragging her down while ice crept up their own arms and across their torsos.

But the infected appeared to lack survival instincts.

The third stood below her, hands raised, spraying a thick green liquid that hardened on impact, clinging to Julia’s legs and slowing her down.

Alexander conjured a sharpened tungsten rod from his ring and dove. He struck the infected from above, driving the rod through the back of its neck, slamming the body into the ground and pinning it. The impact jarred all the way up to his shoulder, but the green spray stopped.

The infected turned its head slowly to look at him over its shoulder. Red eyes found his.

Alexander poured lightning into the rod.

The infected convulsed, back arching, mouth opening in a scream.

Alexander didn’t pause. He fed more power into the assault, feeling his reserves dip as the lightning burned through flesh from the inside out until the red eyes flickered, dimmed, then went out.

He ripped the rod free, turning to help Julia with the other two, only to witness her twist out of the grips so hard their frozen arms and shoulders shattered.

Their eyes met for a brief moment, then she launched east, moving to intercept another infected superhuman.

Alexander pulsed Metallokinesis, taking back to the sky.

The battlefield had shifted. It was subtle, but visible from above.

Annie was back in human form, still covered in metal, carving through the swarming enemies coming from the south end now that they’d thinned out.

Augustus, Talia, and Cash, along with the few remaining Emirates Superhuman Authority agents were pushing north and west, moving to meet the infected instead of barely holding the line as they had been earlier.

Droney had his drones spread out, but still tightly positioned, forming a net around the survivors clustered at the center.

And above it all, a massive undulating blob of blood pulsed and raged as the chains binding it tightened, slowly compressing it and carrying it higher into the sky.

The Northern Shield raced around the mass, striking again and again, light lancing between the chains, burning into the blood.

Maximilian climbed. Each footstep landing on a briefly conjured barrier which disappeared as he rose to the next one.

Alexander drifted toward them, lightning crackling down his arm as it finally returned to full charge.

Then a face formed in the blood, chains crisscrossing over its features as it strained against them.

It grinned. Then opened its mouth.

“I felt it, too…”