Chapter 211

System stood frozen in place next to Luke while his red doppelganger started working. It—he?—ignored Luke. A new system window popped up, this one red to match the doppelganger, and he started working in it.

Whatever language it was in, Luke didn’t recognize it. The text was also scrolling by so fast that he couldn’t get a good look at it even when it wasn’t obscured by new windows popping up inside the big one. Those appeared and vanished at speeds far beyond Luke’s ability to parse, even though he still retained all the awareness his high perception granted him.

The entire void shook somehow. Luke was thrown to the side in a sensation eerily similar to standing in a truck bed while it drove over a deep pothole. Considering that he was floating in a vast gulf of nothingness, it was a bit of a shock for him. Next to him, System remained frozen in place, apparently unaffected by anything going on around him.

“You alright there?” he asked the blue apparition even though he didn’t expect an answer. He just wanted to confirm that System was stuck in place.

The void shook again, but this time Luke was able to brace himself on… something… He wasn’t sure exactly how it worked. As far as he could tell, there was nothing there, but holding onto it kept him stable anyway. The shaking didn’t stop after one violent motion this time, instead continuing to gain strength and speed.

Suddenly, there was a third System present in the void. This one was colored black, which made it far more difficult to see than the red or blue versions. Looking at it was more like seeing an outline of a shape than the shape itself, and it was impossible to keep track of specific limbs once it started moving.

“How dare you!” the black System demanded. It was strange to hear actual emotion in System’s voice, something Luke didn’t think had ever happened before.

Then the black System leaped on the red one, interrupting its work for just a moment before a second and then third red Systems appeared on either side. They grabbed hold of the black System and forced him back while he ranted and screamed. A moment later, he noticed Luke floating there and snarled out, “You! The key! How are you here?”

“Uh, well… You know… lots of walking, mostly in the right direction. Few detours here and there,” Luke said.

“You have no idea what you’re meddling with, do you?” the black System spat. “You’re going to break everything and doom us all, and for what? Your ego? You think you can control Ix’althor’nan? You can’t. None of us can. It will consume everything! Stop this foolishness now, before it’s too late.”

“Ix-what-athan?” Luke repeated, making no move to stop anything.

“Ix’althor’nan!” the black System screeched as he renewed his struggles to break free from the red Systems. “The Hive. The Devourer. The End of Divinity. The God Trapped in the Machine.”

“Ooooh. That Ixamaman,” Luke said. “Right. No, I’m not going to… uh, control it. It can stay right where it is trapped here.”

Before the black System could reply, it vanished from the void. All three of the red Systems announced in unison, “Updates complete. Generating new permission profile for-”

Luke didn’t see blue System move until he had already split the red Systems into pieces.

“Okay, someone tell me what the fuck is going on here,” Luke said. “There’s not going to be a pink or yellow version of you popping up right? I think Power Rangers might sue someone if that happens.”

* * *

In all the millennia he had been active, System had never been fully locked out of the system itself before. Whatever this aberration that had appeared and taken his form was, it had successfully infiltrated the system so quickly that System found himself on the outside of his own domain.

He was not without resources of his own, however. His permissions might be crippled, but Luke Bennet was still an administrator, and he still had a status. He was part of the system, which meant he was part of System, and that made him a vulnerability that System could exploit to fight back.

It took subjective days to find his way back in, and by that time the aberration had all-but-finished its own patch on the system protocols. It had set up a contingency to target a specific god by scanning for a creature with a high likelihood of death and disrupting the XP return mechanism. Several hundred thousand targets had had their own personal system profiles corrupted, and as soon as the first one died, it had carried XP through the soul removal process and dug a hook into Zixin.

System did not understand what happened next. Just from his review of the logs, what should have happened was that the hook tore off a tiny piece of Zixin’s divinity and brought it back to the God Machine. Instead, somehow, all of Zixin had appeared in the system’s pseudo space. System suspected outside interference, though he had no way to confirm that. Given the nature of the aberration and its own knowledge of how the system functioned, Hestoc seemed the most likely suspect behind this occurrence.

By the time System had restored himself to full control, the God Machine had consumed Zixin’s divinity and left a mortal shell in her place. That would need to be addressed, but disposing of the aberration and assessing what damages it had inflicted took precedence. It seemed like most of the aberration’s actions had been directed at attacking Zixin after ensuring that System himself could not interfere.

Clever, because System’s own protocols would have required him to do so. Now that the deed was done, Zixin’s stolen divinity had degraded the God Machine’s structural integrity by some twenty-three percent as it struggled to adapt to a prisoner that was suddenly so much bigger than it had been. The stored bank of XP rose dramatically at a time when the God Machine could ill afford to be stressed, given the disruption to its normal cycling operations.

If not for the demons still present in the world and thus under the umbrella of the God Machine’s authority, System suspected that the sudden influx would have broken it. The demons didn’t strictly reinforce the God Machine to hold against its prisoner, but they did weaken the trapped god somewhat. Whatever they were made of, being the antithesis to divinity itself was having a positive effect on the God Machine’s stability.

With Zixin’s system avatar shattered and the aberration disposed of, System needed time to finish fixing the changes the God Machine had been infected with. Most importantly, he needed to prevent the new protocols from revoking Luke Bennet’s administrator access. So much of what System desired to accomplish was dependent on an administrator allowing him to override his own operations protocols.

It seemed there was one last gamble to overcome. Zixin might no longer be a god, but her mortal shell was still powerful. She’d managed to siphon enough XP from the God Machine to form herself a body that was level 100, though she’d been stymied by the system-imposed level cap. If not for that, she might have been able to reignite her own divine spark. It wouldn’t be enough for her to escape the trap she’d been caught in, but it would be plenty to destroy Luke Bennet.

“Okay, someone tell me what the fuck is going on here,” Luke Bennet said. “There’s not going to be a pink or yellow version of you popping up right? I think Power Rangers might sue someone if that happens.”

System did not understand the reference, but that was not necessary to proceed. “Zixin’s mortal form has been shunted from pseudo space into the God Machine. My apologies, but I must terminate this session so that you are able to defend yourself from her.”

“Wait, wha-”

But Luke Bennet spoke far too slowly, and System had already ejected him back out into the real world.

* * *

If Luke had thought the cathedral had been overwhelming before Hestoc’s little virus had done its thing, it absolutely flattened him now. He snapped back to himself and immediately fell on his ass just from opening his eyes.

A scraping sound in the room caught his attention, if only because it was distinctly normal. Someone was there, and they weren’t made of divine particulates or whatever. At a guess, Luke would say this was Zixin, no longer a god and probably pissed to high hell about that.

Hestoc, bastard that he was, had not warned Luke that he’d have the physical manifestation of the Goddess of Death herself standing right next to him. Hopefully she was just as out-of-sorts from standing inside the God Machine as Luke himself was, but the way his life always went, he wasn’t going to bet on it. Carefully, blindly, Luke started walking backward toward the door. If he had to fight for his life, he wanted to do it in a place where opening his eyes wouldn’t cause his brain to short-circuit.

He heard Zixin stumbling after him. It looked like he’d gotten lucky after all. She was having just as hard a time as he was. He scrambled to escape the God Machine first, but felt something ghost past him just before he reached the door. Luke made it out to open air and cracked an eye open with relief.

Just behind him was the brain-busting cathedral, but as long as he didn’t look directly at it, it wasn’t so bad knowing that it was there. If it came down to a fight, tactical positioning was going to be the make-or-break part of the battle. While the outside wasn’t nearly as bad as the interior, it was plenty disorienting.

And then Luke got a look at Zixin’s avatar. She was standing with her back turned to him, surveying the ring of mountains that surrounded the God Machine. As Luke came stumbling outside, she said, “I don’t know how you did this, but if I have to break the God Machine in half to get my power back, I will. And I’ll kill you first. One benefit about being stuck in a mortal body, I can finally squish you personally.”

Zixin was wearing all black, which Luke supposed made sense considering what she’d been responsible for prior to the whole de-godding incident. Black hair fell down a back left bare by a gown equally dark. It had slits down either side, revealing well-toned leg just as pale as her back.

She had no weapon, but then, she hardly needed one. When Luke tried to hit her with an [Analyze], it only got five lines in before something went wrong.

[Name: Zixin]
[Level: 100]
[XP: 3978170]
[AP: 0]
[Bloodline: Avatar of Death]
[Ste8#EiN&K@q#(sk$!)@.

The status window [Analyze] normally showed him faded into nothingness after giving him a string of random syllables, but that was honestly all he needed to know. It didn’t seem likely Zixin was going to have a shit build.

All of that aside, the thing that worried Luke the most was that despite having never heard her voice, Zixin looked extremely familiar. In fact, standing at a few inches over four feet tall, she resembled a dwifkin, of all things.

She turned to face him, and Luke’s stomach lurched. “What’s wrong?” she said with a cruel laugh. “Of all the souls in my possession, this is the one you spent the most time with. I thought you’d be happy to see her face one last time before I end your miserable life.”

Zea smiled up at him, but her face had never held an expression that cold. Her skin had never been that pale, and her eyes had never been so dead.

“Lady, you might resemble her, but you ain’t her. If you think this is going to keep me from kicking your ass, you’re dead wrong.”

“Oh, I do so love breaking spirits. This will be fun,” Zixin said.

Luke hit her with an [Inflict Status] to reset her XP, but the skill just errored out.

“Oh shi-” he started to say, just before something hit him like a speeding truck.