The sound of masonry and wood bursting apart under preternatural strength sounded from afar, followed by an inhuman roar. North-east, five hundred meters, the Windborne Word judged.
The Totem Warrior in his transformed state sniffed the air and growled. Cherish, a scent trail only minutes old, leading eastward.
Which to take first? The Brute who was likely to cause more casualties with every minute he was alive, or the Master whose senses extended far beyond the village and could manipulate the Nine's victims into just about anything?
"Hunt her down," I commanded the beast whose shoulders stood higher than the crown of my head. When it came to asset denial, Thinkers ranked above Brutes.
The massive ursine predator snorted and began stalking our prey.
However, we were interrupted before reaching the False Idol's daughter.
All around, for hundreds of meters in all directions, the glass fragments scattered on the ground everywhere from Shatterbird's song began to shiver and hum.
The continuous sorcerous resonance I'd perceived earlier swelled into a tidal wave that swept the glittering shards up into the air and into a spiraling upward current that shredded trees and eroded the more flimsy residential houses like a sandblaster writ large.
With a grunt, the Totem Warrior shielded me with his body, glass bouncing off his thick hide and bone plates. Summoning the Sunwell to my side, I stood still, knowing that a moving obstruction in the path of the glass would likely be too much for the Empty Silhouette to cover up.
The tall faerie warrior, with her beautiful, dark skin and well-endowed figure, accentuated by the thin strips of white that had formed a swimsuit-style costume when she was alive, made for an interesting contrast against my pale skin, petite figure, and concealing cloak. But what I had called her for were her eyes and her reach.
The Sunwell's eyes worked like LIDAR, perceiving the approaching threat with supernatural clarity as if it stood before me rather than flying high in the air hundreds of meters away: A middle-eastern woman armored in elaborate armor of shining colored glass, shaped like a dress around her body and into a beaked mask around her head.
Shatterbird, indiscriminate killer of thousands, was at the center of the vast swirling vortex that seemed to fill most of the sky with glittering glass. A silicokinetic with both exceedingly fine control and macroscale range, the more glass she had under her power, the more the resonance amplified her song and the further she extended her reach. As the Nine's herald, she had devastated entire cities.
Her storm of glass was both defense and weapon, putting a hundred layers of magically reinforced glass between herself and any attacker while flensing the flesh from their bones with a thousand knives of near monomolecular sharpness.
Between her flexible combat capability, her silicokinetic perception, and her flight, Shatterbird was not a bad choice to investigate potential trouble.
Just not good enough.
A silent command to the Sunwell while I replaced the Empty Silhouette with the Indirect Steersman, and her eyes lit up with prismatic light as she exerted them to the utmost. The chaotic blur of flying glass resolved into crystal clear perception and seemed to slow almost to a crawl. Each piece of silica, no matter how small, was measured, tracked, and accounted for.
The Indirect Steersman's face contorted in concentration under his bulbous goggles. A lobe of crystalline computronium brain tissue somewhere within my greater self calculated trajectories and modelled interactions from the deluge of data provided by the two of them. Then, just as the flying faerie warrior's less acute eyes took note of our group, the green-garbed faerie scholar raised one hand and pointed with his many-jointed fingers.
The Sunwell's subtle aura intensified into a visible, sharply delineated corona from which a half dozen lines of glaring light shot forth.
None of the beams reached their target without obstruction, of course. Sooner or later, each beam hit one shard of glass or another.
However, instead of splitting, diffusing, or refracting, they bounced off without diminishing. Then they reflected off another piece, and then another. For an infinitesimal moment, the sky lit up with a chaotic, shifting criss-cross of unnaturally coherent sunlight beams illuminating the swirling storm of glass.
Then, all at once, the many times reflected beams converged on Shatterbird's glass-armored form. There was a cry of surprise and pain, a violent ripple that propagated through the glass maelstrom. Then she fell.
Glass crunched loudly under my bare feet as I approached her fallen form, covering the quiet rustling as faint snakelike blurs rushed ahead of my steps with sinuous fluidity.
The Sunwell in her discorporated form was enough to armor my soles against the points and sharp edges. With her reservoir depleted, that was the most she could do for me now, apart from lending me her eyes.
I would need to come up with a better way to replenish that reservoir other than simple absorption of sunlight, I idly considered. Even when flying high above the clouds for hours, in life she had never approached an appreciable fraction of her true capacity.
A wheezing croak confirmed what my True Sight had perceived plain as day. Then, in a profoundly unnatural motion as if pulled by marionette strings, Shatterbird pulled herself up. Her head wobbled unhealthily, charred bone showing beneath burnt flesh in several places, her eyes wept blood and vitreous liquid, and her limbs were bent. But what would kill a regular person was far from enough to deal with one who had been under Bonesaw's scalpel.
With a high, keening note, thousands of cruel shards sought my death, not in a simple storm but in rippling flurries coming at me from all sides. If my defense required conscious thought from me, then the injured faerie warrior's assault might have had a chance. If it possessed a weak point, then she would have found it.
As it was, the Surgebinder's omnidirectional repelling field turned the flying projectiles aside without issue.
A massive spear of compacted glass followed, its formation and gravity-aided descent deftly concealed among the deluge of glittering shrapnel. The Windborne Word hammered it aside with a battering ram of wind so compressed that when she let it go, it exploded almost like a bomb and momentarily cleared the air between us of shards.
"Hello, Shatterbird."
The Nine's herald coughed and spat to the side, a gob of coagulated blood hitting the asphalt. She had evidently used the cover of her own attacks to repair her broken armor in the interim, minutely controlled structures of smooth glass plugging every external wound, stabilizing broken bones, and sheathing her in layers of power-imbued protection.
Between the silicokinetic exoskeleton and whatever combat stimulants Bonesaw's implants were dosing her with, she was standing on her feet again. Fury burned in her heart even as her expression, under the thick, rippling glass, was a slack mask of ruined flesh.
"You're already dead." The silicokinetic's voice was badly slurred, but not to the point that I could not extract her meaning. "Your entire team is dead, even if they don't know it yet. Jack is going to make an example of you. And then Bonesaw will bring you back to do it all over again."
She hadn't caught more than a glimpse of me and the Totem Warrior, then. The distance had been too great for her to make out details, much less to recognize me.
Good. Let Jack stew in ignorance and misinformation.
Again, she blasted me with a stream of glass, but it was less an attack than a screen to cover her escape. Her power gripping the armor that encased her form, she catapulted herself upward – only to jerk to a violent halt, body and limbs twitching and bouncing in midair, caught in a spider web stronger than steel wire.
Invisible to her power and so light as to offer no resistance at all until pulled taut, the braided carbon nanotube strings controlled by the Ropemaker's Daughter were as good as unbreakable. If not for the thick armor, Shatterbird might have strangled or even dismembered herself. Even so, they cut deeply into the power-reinforced material before the whiplash forced her to let go of her power and fall back to the ground.
"I think not." The Windborne Word carried my declaration to my opponent's ears, without need for me to raise my voice. My chorus, for once, was silent.
At a small gesture from me, the Surgebinder silently propelled a decorative boulder from a lawn to my right high into the air while my discombobulated opponent had not the wits to control her power and notice.
"Who … who even are you?" Bonesaw's drugs had to be strong stuff because Shatterbird was still conscious. Blind eyes raised in my direction, dust and sand moved unnaturally as she tried to subtly feel out her surroundings with fine silica, even as her limbs failed her. "There aren't supposed to be any hero teams like this in the whole state."
Heroes? There were no heroes here.
"Then you shall die as you lived, in ignorance."
The boulder came down like a hammerblow at the end of a pillar of compressed air, the Surgebinder and the Windborne Word working in concert to overpower the Glass Singer's last-second efforts at interposing barriers of charged glass.
"No –"
A wet crunch, then the tinkling of falling glass. And silence.
***
Maybe the String Conductor thought herself clever in concealing herself among the terrified victims hiding in the village's small church. The long-ranged empathic perception that made her a priority target would certainly have alerted her to Shatterbird's demise even if she wasn't close enough to hear the battle, such as it had been.
The profundity of my sight made such deceptions useless, however. The faerie that endowed her with its magic shone like a bonfire, the red brick walls of the church building no more an obstruction than its dubious spirituality.
A breath of magic lingered upon the others, too – a faerie glamour not unlike the False Idol's, but of a more subtle sort. Not obsession burned deeply into the neural wends, but passions inflamed and inhibitions massaged away.
The results were no less ugly, however: The men among the congregation came at me from all sides, armed with improvised weapons, as soon as I stepped through the doors. Their expressions were twisted with righteous rage and desperation, their minds full of riotous glamour.
A priest lay unconscious near the altar in a fetal position, badly beaten.
Swifter than thought, the shades following in my wake shifted and switched out: The Paperworker, the Sympathist, the Dreambringer.
Flying paper covered my glamoured assailants' eyes and slid underneath their shoes. Blunt origami hands punched and gripped. Folded links formed into chains or wove into braids that tripped and constrained. Then, faerie runes lit up in blue light on the paper bands wrapping around their heads, an exact match for the master talisman in the hands of the Dreambringer, and their struggles subsided.
Not one of them so much as managed to lay a hand on me while my feet carried me forward through the seeming chaos in constant unhurried cadence. Silence fell as I reached the other end of the nave and let my shades disappear again.
"Don't think I can't see you there, Cherish," I addressed the small huddle behind the baptismal font. "Show yourself, or I shall take it as an insult." My chorus filled the nave with whispering echoes, strongly implying the folly of such attempts at delaying the inevitable.
"Alright, alright! Let me up." With a subtle chord, the glamour on my quarry's human shields shifted, and they moved aside to let the False Idol's daughter stand up.
Unlike in the family photographs, tattoos covered every part of her visible skin, impressive in their grotesquerie. A strain of vivid red among her dark hair gave the impression of a bleeding head wound. Two fingers on her left hand were visibly mismatched in skin tone and proportions.
"I'm sorry, okay?" she started, her voice shaky. "Really, whoever you are, I'm sorry about that misunderstanding. I only – the Slaughterhouse Nine are in town, we're only trying to get through this alive! Can you help us?"
There were even tears in her eyes to better sell the deception.
All the while, unseen fingers tried to pluck at emotional strings that they could neither perceive nor touch, attempting to support her lies and make me one of her thralls.
Tried and tried again, in futility, as the String Conductor's eyes grew wider with the dreadful realization that their magic was entirely useless here.
"No." My chorus underlaid my words in silver bells and breaking glass. "This was a foolish attempt when your father tried it, and you have not half of his strength."
More breadth and capacity for subtle complexities, certainly, but then my nature did not compel me to speak the whole truth.
The False Idol manifested a few steps ahead to my left, diminished as he was, with his eyes burned-out pits, the glittering marble of his flesh eroded by invasive vines, and an important part of his anatomy broken off.
Cherish recognized him immediately, even with the changes in physiognomy that brought the ugliness within to the outside, the elongated canines, and the expression frozen in a predatory leer. She cringed away in a conditioned fear reflex, then recoiled even further as I allowed her telepathy to peer into his state of mind.
"What –"
"His power may render him resistant to emotional glamours, but pain is an able teacher. Heartbreaker will take his place among my faerie court soon enough."
Ah. There was the spark of recognition in her eyes. There was the realization and the fear.
I smiled thinly as I dismissed the False Idol and pinned Cherish down with a penetrating stare. My eyes burned painfully hot as the Feather Scales measured the weight of her heart.
"You know all too well his foul touch upon you." I tilted my head, the Vizier whispering in my ear. "No, not in that way. He was not that sort of monster. But you have suffered the violation of your mind, many times. How, then, can you stomach doing the same to others? Why is it that you even strive to surpass him in depravity alongside the Nine?"
"I – I …" The glamourweaver was pale and struggled to speak, thrown off-balance by the succession of emotional blows. "You don't understand! It was only so I'd be safe from him! As soon as I had control over them, I could have turned them all in."
"But you wouldn't have." Tapping into her very own magic, the Thinker interference swiftly unraveled by the scholars among my courtiers, it wasn't hard to deduce her plans. "They would have been your cudgel to strike fear in the hearts of all who would oppose you, your minions as you eclipsed your father as the preeminent warlord, rapist, and murderer in your family."
"No …"
But her denials rang hollow against the analysis of my courtiers, and, although her power could not work on me, she was socially savvy enough to see that. Again, thinking her magic unobserved, she began plucking the strings of emotions all around.
"It may surprise you, coming from one walking a path paved with the bones of the slain, but I have a particular distaste for rapists of all kinds. And you have been quite prolific in that regard, haven't you, Cherish?"
Despite her being more than a head taller than me, she quailed under my stony gaze like a child in front of an adult, who knew that she was going to be punished but didn't quite understand why what she had done was bad.
Eyes wide and darting back and forth wildly, the String Conductor wrung her hands and tried a different approach.
"Please. Let me make up for what Heartbreaker made me do, then. Let me serve under you as your minion. I'll do anything!" There was a subtle change in her posture as she thrust out her chest and emphasized her figure, even as her words shook with submission and vulnerability. "Teach me where I've gone wrong, punish me however you like …"
The nerve of her! How did she even know that … Did she really think this sort of manipulation would actually work on anyone if she wasn't literally tugging at their heartstrings? Dogshit wrapped in a pretty package was still just that.
No, no, no, I was just going to completely ignore that. For my own peace of mind, more than anything else.
"Serve you shall," I nodded gravely, my outward expression unchanged. "But I dare say, it may be some time until you work your way up to 'minion' from 'instrument'."
For a moment, Cherish only looked confused, then a horrified realization spread across her face. Her faerie plucked three dozen strings at once with the discordant jangle of a corpse falling into a concert piano.
More victims of glamour burst into the church behind me with a clamor at the same moment that the String Conductor's hostages stepped in front of her, closing ranks to shield her with their bodies.
Ducking low, Cherish turned the corner and scrambled out the altar dais' side door.
I only shook my head, calling on the Paperworker and the Ropemaker's Daughter to defend me with whipping chains of folded paper links while the Totem Warrior manifested on the other side of the human wall.
There was a scream of surprise and fear, then the rattling of the door to the outside.
Panicked running footsteps ended in a dull thud.
A high-pitched screech of pain that suddenly cut off.
Then the noise of massive jaws chewing something crunchy.
Ethereal tentacles gripped the shade loosened from its mortal shell.
"That's three," I commented, workmanlike, standing among the paper-bound forms of former thralls. "But now the clock is ticking."
***
The Evolutionary Adaptor's host had long left any semblance of humanity behind. He loomed over his victim like a monstrous, six-legged beast the size of a van, a grotesque fusion of bear and panther. His black, iridescent body was layered in armor plates, with flexible scales at the joints and bristling spines everywhere else. A hundred solid-black eyes lined his body, staring from the gaps in his plating.
"Come on," he growled in a low, resonant rumble barely recognizable as human. "Stand up. Fight. Hurt me!"
Like a cat playing with a mouse, Crawler's forked forelimbs, bearing massive scimitar-like claws alongside uncanny long-fingered hands, batted the struggling man in the metallic green costume back and forth between them.
"Crawler was it?" My words echoed strangely, as if cutting down any extraneous noise to make themselves understood. "You are one ugly thing, aren't you?"
The predatory colossus whirled around, dangerously fast despite its size. Dozens of eyes blinked, then his maw, filled with jagged, mismatched fangs that dripped acidic saliva, opened, and Crawler laughed, an ear-splitting sound as if he was gargling rocks.
"You! The littlest cape killer." His many eyes shone brightly and luminously with excitement. "Jack said we should give you some space before coming to recruit you, but now you've come to us! Come on, then, show me what you've got. Fight me!"
"Convince me that you're worth my time."
At a gesture - unnecessary, but properly theatrical - two shades rose from the ground between us: A massive figure, two and a half meters tall without counting the bone spikes growing from his shoulder and from the crown of his head, and a slighter form, leather-clad and adorned with chains and skull emblems.
"The Enduring Shield adapts to every challenge. The Withering Gaze is the bane of all organic life. Survive them, and you shall have the honor of facing me."
Rearing up, Crawler roared his enthusiastic acceptance of my terms, acidic spittle flying.
Interrupting him, the Enduring Shield's muscles bulged grotesquely, and, with a bellow, he crossed the couple of meters between him and Crawler to deliver an uppercut. With a sound like a thunderclap, the van-sized hexaped was hurled a dozen meters down the street in blatant defiance of biomechanics.
As the warrior shade followed up with a jump kick carrying similarly preternatural force, breaking a whole section of armor, the Withering Gaze raised one hand as if drawing an invisible gun and aiming.
With a dry hiss, every one of Crawler's eyes exposed to the magic crumbled away into dust. His legs decayed away into ash and fragmenting bones, then the hex began to spread deeper into his body.
"Yes! Yes! It hurts so good! Like that! More!" Crawler's cries of exultation shook the walls of the nearby houses.
For my part, I turned toward his victim lying discarded to one side of the road.
He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, clad in a green-metallic costume that blazed with magic in my True Sight. The armor was sleek but segmented, giving the impression of a futuristic knight, with a dark green sash tied at his waist.
Claw marks, abrasions, and acid burns showed the toll that engaging with the high-level Brute had taken on him. Dark blood stained the high-tech cloth, leaked from the gaps between the armor plates.
The faerie warrior struggled to rise for long seconds but ultimately collapsed again. Kneeling beside him, I called the Apothecary to my side.
"Peace, knight of the Protectorate. Your battle is over. The Evolutionary Adaptor has found his match. His end will come soon enough."
With a click, the visor of his helmet released at the Apothecary's touch, revealing a skull burnt clean of skin and muscle by paranormal acid.
"The active principle was injected here." Unfazed by the strange sight, the pharmacology tinker pointed to the teeth marks penetrating the armor at the hero's shoulder. The contraption strapped to her right forearm, consisting of brass framework, glass tubing, and crystal bulbs holding various liquids, dripped a drop of luminescent fluid into the wound, then another of a different color.
After a couple of seconds, she shook her head. "No pulse. No circulation. No bioelectric activity. Major tissue defects incompatible with life. Even if there had been time to concoct a Reanimation Elixir, he would still be beyond my help."
And yet his magic shone brightly, his faerie still bound to the mortal realm.
"Fascinating."
Behind me, there was a roar and a sizzling noise loud enough to make me briefly turn my head.
The Enduring Shield was down one arm, though the stump was already growing back. The furnace of prismatic lights pulsing throughout his body swirled and reconfigured into an even more resilient arrangement.
A lake of stone-eating acid surrounded him, expelled from the reservoir sack at Crawler's throat, but the giant shade only laughed. Blue-gray flesh and white bone liquified into a bubbling slurry running down his body, but already spikes of anthracite-dark bones and crystals shining radioactive blue grew to replace it.
The Withering Gaze, meanwhile, had circled around and once again found a gap in Crawler's armor through which her hex could penetrate and work to turn all organic material in its path to dust. The monstrous hexaped howled in surprise and near orgasmic pain.
"Please." Despite the death of his mortal vessel, the voice of the fallen knight came to me clearly enough, his head lifted to meet my eyes, and the fingers of his gauntlet gripping the hem of my shroud's wide sleeve. "Cotillion. The children. Jack has them inside the school's gym." Green fire glimmered in the empty eyes of his skull. "Save them. Please."
Was his will so strong as to override the faerie's precept to bind only to living hosts? No, not quite. He had employed his magic of bestowal, of empowering objects through the medium of emotions and ideas, to infuse the majority of his mind and will into his armor. All so he could fight on, even as his body failed him.
A fascinating magic, wielded by a will unshaken by his own death. I was impressed.
"Swear to wield that admirable resolve on my behalf, to serve me faithfully, and I shall do all that I can for those who still live."
I expected condemnation, an appeal to morality, or at the very least, some hesitation. Instead …
"Done." The dead man's sepulchral voice echoed strangely even as he fell back, let out one last, rattling breath, and the fires of his magic began to dim.
My eyes narrowed. Did he think that his form of undeath would preclude him from falling under my power? If so, then it was a respectable attempt to get the better of me in a deal. Not tricky enough, however.
"Done," I affirmed, and drew taut the words that bound us until the power obligation hummed like a steel cord under tension. Pure white energy flowed, feeding and stoking the embers of the Shintai Priest's magic anew. And with it came the ethereal touch of the Keeper of the Dead.
Strange case though this was, with the knight's soul and faerie bound to his armor, he would still not escape his obligation to me. In life, I doubted that he would have accepted such a contract, with the terms so skewed in my favor. But in undeath, his thoughts were bent to the purpose he had set for himself with monomaniacal focus.
Giving a satisfied little nod, I stood and turned back to the tussle between my chosen warrior shades and the Evolutionary Adaptor.
The Enduring Shield was now struggling mightily to escape the Crawler's maw that had caught him around the waist and was slowly but surely chewing him apart. His blows struck with the force of industrial power hammers, but he could not find any weak spot for them to make a difference.
The Withering Gaze, meanwhile, was tensing her whole body and grimacing mightily behind her silver death mask as she concentrated all her power upon the six-legged beast and yet saw little effect apart from the tinkling of shed scales.
Crawler's appearance had changed significantly in the half minute he had battled against my shades. The tentacles along his sides had disappeared, as had the visible eyes. Layers of metallo-ceramic scales, shimmering purple where they caught the sun, covered every part of his body. Like hairs or nails, they were appendages that did not truly live, nor was their material makeup organic enough to count for the purpose of the Withering Gaze's power.
An adaptation perfectly suited to counter her power, but one that carried certain costs as well.
"Enough playing around," I commanded.
Both shades dissolved into smoke, one disappearing back into my inner court, the other swirling around me and infusing my flesh with its unearthly strength.
Howling like a steam train with anger at having his victims stolen away, Crawler leapt towards me as if propelled by a catapult. Eight tons of armored monster bore down on me with claws like scythes, teeth like a power cutter, and with acid spew that would eat through battleship-grade armor in seconds.
At the very last moment, I stepped aside with speed beyond the domain of biophysics, born of cellular-scale psychokinesis. My hand touched Crawler's scaled flank, and a tall, lanky figure manifested at my side, their hand coming to rest beside mine.
"Gently now," I spoke to the Fractal Seed. "Material defined by touch designation. Arboriform algorithm, speed point one standard, seven iterations."
There was an awful blast of sound, an extended crackling and crunching noise as if from a car crashing through a thicket, then silence.
"What … what is this?" The voice of the Evolutionary Adaptor was small, confused, and much more human all of a sudden. "Where is the pain? I should feel pain. How can I know that I'm alive without pain? How can I know that I matter? Why do I only feel cold?"
"That is because you are already dead."
A massive tree of black iridescent metallo-ceramic growth stood before me, roots extending deep into the ground, and its crown towering thirty meters or more into the sky. Hundreds of secondary growths, sharp as spears, the same as the tree's main branches, penetrated through the trunk before branching into a dense thicket of razor-thin spikes.
Purple blood leaked from the points where those secondary growths burst from the trunk. Eyes, randomly placed along the trunk and the larger branches behind scales of transparent sapphire, rolled without coordination before eventually falling still.
Several secondary branches had punched through my shroud, but between the Dimensional Sheath mitigation and the Enduring Shield's resilience, not one of them had pierced my skin.
The Fractal Seed, of course, had bent all of the outgrowths around him without even noticing. With a delicate little snap, he broke off his index finger, which had transformed into the same material as the tree and fused with it – or rather, which had been the origin point of the transformation and fractal expansion.
"Well done." I gave him an approving nod as he retreated into my inner court, then let out a deep breath.
This had been close. Despite specifying parameters set to minimal settings, I had only barely managed to avoid spearing through all the houses along the street with hundreds of fractally expanding metallo-ceramic branches.
And Crawler's scales, optimized for toughness and defense, were a relatively harmless origin material.
The Fractal Seed was a shade that I called upon so very rarely because their power was often disastrous in the near-inevitable collateral. A threat on par with the Ash Beast in its indiscriminate destructiveness, if in a different way.
Come to think of it, maybe I should pay that unfortunate soul over in Africa a visit. With the right artifacts to better channel and control their unruly power, both of these held significant potential to become more than barely controllable S-class threats.
After I had completed my obligation here, of course.
Recalling the Apothecary, who was taking samples of Crawler's acid, I drew on the magic of the Birdwatcher. Wings of light-swallowing vantablack sprang from my back, spreading thirty meters to each side, and catapulted me high into the sky with a single beat.
The rising tension phase of a horror movie, where the monster in the dark picked off stragglers one by one, was over.
By now, Jack would have realized who it was that hunted them.
Now came the chase.
Besides, having given my word to the Shintai Priest, there was no time to waste.
A school gymnasium, was it? That promised nothing good.
Seems that was a good choice not to make any plans for chapter releases. February passed in a haze of seasonal depression, if thankfully not as bad as some of the previous years. Then I got back into White Wizards War and spent a couple of weeks traveling before returning to visit family the week before Easter.
Now, with My Good Girl Era and An Old Man's Retirement starting back up and WWW 20 stuck in revision hell, the muse finally saw fit to have me finish Chapter 11. The next one should finish the S9 arc, though, once again, I'll give no ETAs. Who knows what's going to happen or get in the way this time.
The Fractal Seed, by the way, is one of the powers that canon!Ciara used against Scion to great effect.