Manifold [An Interstellar Sci-Fi Progression Story with LitRPG Elements]

"Belekov!" Entuban roared, grabbing at his chest and finding that he had left his carbine back in the APC.

"Thete, leave him!" Betelgeuse yelled, "get back here!"

Belekov had already disappeared through a narrow tunnel at the far end, almost half a kilometer away. His speed far outstripping anything Thete, much less Betelgeuse, could manage.

Thete ground to a halt, hissing like a cat in the direction which Belekov had disappeared. Filippov turned slowly, drunkenly, in the direction of the commotion, too late to catch even a glimpse of the perpetrator.

Betelgeuse was instantly beside the APC, inspecting the damage. The four wheels on its right side were releasing air in a steady hiss from where Belekov's bullets had punctured through the superthick rubber.

'A 7.62mm wouldn't have been able to cause such damage,' thought Betelgeuse. 'He's using modded bullets. Definitely not Standard Issue.'

"Something's coming," Filippov said, rasping exhaustedly. He looked close to collapsing from fatigue.

"What's coming?" Betelgeuse snapped, turning to Filippov. Behind him he could hear Entuban saying something like "we have to be taping it—Thete, there is the Seal-it-In…"

"A bunch of them," Filippov managed, falling to his knees and sighing like he was ready to give up his life if only he would be allowed to rest from all this interminable running.

Betelgeuse hefted him and stuffed the ragged-looking man into the APC cabin, then angled his head inward: "Tangoes inbound! Douglas, Voke, masks on and get up top! And get me a weapon!"

Shuffling sounds and shouts emanated from within the APC. Betelgeuse slammed the door shut quickly.

A second later, the APC's topside hatch cranked open, and Douglas poked his head out, gas-mask and all.

"Ballsman, look sharp!"

Douglas threw a carbine up into the air, and it arced a steep trajectory towards Betelgeuse, who plucked it deftly from the air.

Click-clack.

Betelgeuse cocked the carbine's charging handle and pulled the weapon-sling over his head, then settled into observing the frontage.

Another carbine was thrown at Entuban, who caught it and set up in a crouched-supported position beside Betelgeuse. Thete had scaled halfway up the APC and was rummaging frantically through the Emergency Stores Container for the Seal-it-In tape.

"B.T.," a muffled voice called. It was Voke, crouched beside Douglas on the roof of the APC.

"What!" Betelgeuse sounded, keeping his gaze focused upon the looming tunnel entrances. Everything was so dark…

"Edith's going absolutely crazy!" Voke said. "It's like a seizure or something, we've no clue what the fuck it is!"

Edith?

Betelgeuse' mind caught on to the implication immediately.

… extremely sensitive to threats of violence…

Her Increment rendered her a kind of living sensor that was calibrated to detect others' intent-to-violence. But Betelgeuse didn't know she could be this sensitive while inside the APC, with layers of reinforced alloy and granite walls separating her from the source.

Either Edith's sensitivity had grown beyond what Betelgeuse understood, or the weight of the intent-to-violence in question was concentrated and proximate enough to have passed through the APC's hull.

"Entuban, fuck the tires, we gotta pack up and—"

Thunderclap.

Before Betelgeuse could finish, a great purple bolt arced across the frontage and slammed into the side of the APC. Orange sparks burst outward in a violent spray. The APC plating began to glow molten, to sag, but the inside-insulation held.

The bolt came from above. Betelgeuse fired out of reflex, his bullets lacing up the faraway ceiling and digging into granite and sparking off of a metal surface.

The carbine clicked empty.

Cyborg. Betelgeuse blood ran cold. The creature scuttled away, melting into the darkness, like an alligator diving into murky waters.

"Entuban!" Thete cried.

Betelgeuse turned—there was Entuban, fallen to the floor, his entire left arm still flaming.

The cyborg hadn't been aiming at the APC, though the vehicle's natural grounding had attracted most of the impact of the creature's electric cannon.

Atop the APC, Voke was seizing up as if electrocuted, with Douglas trying to pull him back into the insulated troop compartment via the top-hatch.

"Thete, get driving!" Betelgeuse barked, threading his words with a subtle compulsion as he slammed a fresh magazine into his carbine.

Thete complied immediately.

"Entuban," Betelgeuse called, stepping backward and watching the ceiling closely. He received nothing but a tortured groan in reply.

"Entuban! Get up!" he roared, forcing the compulsion on Entuban's pain-blasted mind. He had no choice. He wanted everyone to survive, as far as possible.

Entuban did so, grunting loudly as the APC's engine began to sputter and clank.

Half dead, half alive.

The hull-door of the APC was juddering open even as it began to accelerate on its eight wheels—the left four intact, the right four compromised. Betelgeuse ordered Entuban to get in, then leapt aboard himself just as—

Thunderclap.

The bolt slammed into the top of the vehicle with the rage of heaven, causing a large chunk of the plating to sag inwards like honey. But the insulation held.

'Two hits with its electric cannon at the exact same spot will melt through the chassis, but the cyborg can't aim precisely because the whole chassis is grounded,' Betelgeuse realized.

This time, Betelgeuse had been watching. He took aim and fired his carbine up at the ceiling, from where the electric bolt had come, his hollow-points finding their mark and sparking brightly off the vague outline of the cyborg.

It didn't seem to do much damage.

Behind him, Edith was still struggling against Misha and the Lotuszhink girl. He didn't even know why the girl was still there, why he hadn't thrown her out yet.

Focus on what's important. Now's not the time to get distracted.

Betelgeuse gunned his trigger, feeling the carbine jump in his hand, but observing none of the impacts.

It clicked empty.

The APC screamed into a side tunnel and veered sharply. The distant ceiling was replaced by a nearer, rougher canopy of granite, this one veined with a faint lattice of fissures and barely visible in the thick gloom.

Betelgeuse reloaded. He was down to his last magazine.

Tchunk!

The APC lurched violently, sending Betelgeuse careening into the air. His reflexes took over, and he tucked his knees into his vest, angling his soles downward so that he slammed down feet-first onto the jagged granite floor.

He turned.

The front of the APC had fallen into a rut, with the right of the vehicle angled lower than its left. Thete was trying to reverse, but the blown-out tires could not get any traction on the floor.

"It's a kakking trap!" Misha sounded, crawling out of the backside of the APC and tumbling down onto the ground.

Betelgeuse wasn't listening to what was happening behind him. He sprinted down the length of the tunnel, taking cover at the fork about a hundred meters away and leaning out to see if the cyborg was chasing.

Betelgeuse didn't see the cyborg, but something else. There were shadows—figures, half-cloaked in static and speeding down the tunnel, their weapons held out before them.

The last time Betelgeuse had met them, they'd had Nullifier-Braces installed.

"I need support!" Betelgeuse roared, ripping one of the Nitro-canisters from his vest-pouch and throwing it down the length of tunnel.

His last magazine of 30 rounds. He had to make it count. He took aim at the rolling canister and squeezed the trigger, as the difficult-to-discern, vaguely humanoid figures raced down the dimness.

The canister exploded in an orange burst of flame, sending jagged bits of shrapnel into the static-cloaked figures and hurling several of them against the sides of the tunnel. Betelgeuse strafed out of cover and fired, riddling one of the figures through and seeing it keel over backwards into flame and smog.

That's when he felt it. Their intentionalities. A single-minded intent to kill, coded in a peculiarly uniform frequency, flickering on and off. It wasn't something he could discern with any specificity, just a vague sense that their minds were pointing one way.

Strange, Betelgeuse had never been able to feel someone else's thoughts with such gravity, except that first time when he used the compulsion, when he was touching that Saltillan driver he'd already forgotten the name of. These thoughts felt different, as though they had been compelled to think and do only one thing.

At this moment, Betelgeuse could feel them. All twelve of them, rushing at him. He wondered if this was an attenuated version of what Edith felt, and realized just how damning it would be for a person to have to feel this 24/7.

Because he could feel them, he knew he could control them, Nullifier-Brace or not. He didn't know if they had any on, nor did he really care.

Yes, you can feel them. Grasp their minds, crush their intentionalities, control them.

Ah, but there's no need to crush anything. Take them in your bosom and embrace them like a mother embraces her babe…

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

He let his carbine dangle on its sling and raised his arms as if he were reaching for those blankly-raging minds—trying once, catching some, trying twice, catching all—twisting those uniformly-coded intentionalities like how he'd folded origami dinosaurs in his youth.

The figures stuttered and stopped. Betelgeuse tangled their minds together, injected confusion into their limbs, and they fell like stunned insects to the ground.

Voke and Douglas were beside him. Douglas, the loyal one. Voke, the one who believed differently.

They opened fire, pumping the figures full of lead until even their twitches were silenced.

Then it came.

A metallic arachnid exploded from out of the smog, a chrome skull set high on a torso mounted with carbines. The cyborg was a mobile weapons platform tearing percussively down the tunnel.

Its weapons flashed and smoked, and Betelgeuse clenched his jaw, grabbing his companions' collars and pulling them back with him into cover.

Pain.

Betelgeuse looked down to see that he had been hit in his right thigh, his MDES smoking from a tiny dint. The bullet had failed to penetrate.

Small caliber fire.

"Shit, we gotta help him, Balls!" Douglas yelled, pointing back down the tunnel.

Betelgeuse turned to see the giant Entuban attempting with one arm to lift the desperately revving APC. His left arm looked charred to gristle and was stuck out awkwardly at an angle, like a malformed tree-branch.

"Go," Betelgeuse said, a hatred and anger unlike anything he'd experienced flaring deep within his soul.

Without waiting for their response, Betelgeuse strafed out sideways. The cyborg was almost upon him, but evidently not expecting his sudden appearance. Betelgeuse felt a brief flare of intentionality escape the creature—evidence of its surprise, perhaps—but it quickly receded before Betelgeuse could grasp it.

'As long as I can feel it, I can control it. Its Nullifier-Brace is an imperfect shield,' Betelgeuse thought.

It looked a little different from before, the cyborg. It was borne forward at terrifying momentum by a multitude of long and spindly arms that looked edged with sharp blades—too many to count, too thin to clearly distinguish one from the other. Two thicker arms stuck out of its torso, these ones tipped with ten phalanges each.

A prosthetic eye replaced the one Betelgeuse had taken. Its remaining organic eyeball was trained upon him and juddering uncertainly.

Betelgeuse could feel his own emotions churning, his mind becoming overborne by currents of emotion too powerful for him to suppress.

He advanced, gunning his trigger and emptying his clip into the cyborg's skull, the bullets deflecting off it in dull pings.

The cyborg's intentionality flared. A subconscious reaction to gunfire, a leakage of the mind.

Betelgeuse attempted to catch the cyborg's intentionality as he had done with the cloaked figures, but grasped only torn threads, its intentionality having been suppressed too swiftly.

The intentionality appeared to be suppressed by a counter-pulse generated by a curious structure bolted to the cyborg's gleaming scalp. With every counter-pulse, a field of artificially-generated intentionality not unlike that generated by Kanogg's lattice arrangement of Incunabula was created.

'That's the Nullifier-Brace,' he realized, a device that far outstripped Kanogg's makeshift defence in terms of efficiency and efficacy.

The two bodies were already upon each other. Betelgeuse sprang to its side, dodging the cyborg's vicious swipe and tearing his combat knife from its sheath.

He jumped, slamming hard into the cyborg's elongated side and crumpling several mounted guns with the force of his impact. He swung his knife at the creature's right eyeball.

The cyborg yelled, snapping its torso down flat against its skittering arachnoid limbs. The serrated edge of the combat knife glanced off the side of its skull-mask, as Betelgeuse was thrown off the cyborg's body by the force of its movement.

Its intentionality blazed solar fury. A mixture of anger and consternation and black hatred. Now suspended in mid-air, Betelgeuse tried again to grasp it, but failed. The Nullifier-Brace's counter-pulses suppressed the cyborg's intentionality faster than Betelgeuse could react.

The next moment, Betelgeuse slammed hard into the side of the tunnel, his shoulder making a loud crunch upon that surface.

Pain. He tightened his grip on his knife.

The cyborg whipped around, one of its multi jointed arms scything downwards. Betelgeuse' White Incunabulum pulsed; his powerful thighs flexed, sending him flying off the side of the tunnel as the cyborg's vicious strikes gouged deeply into the ancient granite.

Betelgeuse slammed onto the ground. A red laser lanced out through the darkness. Betelgeuse knew what was coming.

Holding onto his dislocated arm, Betelgeuse jumped again, making it past the tunnel's fork in a single bound.

Thunderclap.

The purple bolt shot out from one of its myriad arms, raising a profusion of sound as it slammed onto the jutting granite wall, glassing it into fulgurite.

The cyborg was far more formidable than before. Betelgeuse knew when the cause was lost.

Gritting his teeth, Betelgeuse sprinted down to where Douglas, Misha, Voke and one-armed Entuban were straining against the weight of the APC. Inside, Thete was gunning the accelerator, but the wheels spun uselessly, unable to pull the vehicle free of the rut.

Hah! Where has all that anger gone! the domineering voice goaded. Coward! Weakling!

Shut up, Betelgeuse raged internally. If I die, whatever the hell you are dies with me.

The cyborg behind him was screaming metal rage; ahead of him, framed by the back-hatch of the APC, stood the thin and wasted body of Edith, her head forced into a slant by her swelling neck, a carbine held in her skeletal hands.

She fired, the recoil pushing her aim up and to the side. The bullets whizzed past him. Betelgeuse felt the cyborg's intentionality flare.

"Misha, Voke, nades out!" Betelgeuse ordered, as he came toward the APC.

With practiced efficiency, the two of them released their grip on the vehicle and dug into their pouches, then lobbed the last of their Nitro-canisters against the cyborg. Edith fired again, this time bracing herself so that her bullets flew true.

The canisters exploded mid-air, engulfing the cyborg with shrapnel and smog. It retaliated with its torso-mounted weapons, but the rounds scattered wildly, its gun barrels clearly warped.

Do I use the same tactics? Blast the fucking thing with our remaining fuel? thought Betelgeuse.

The death-fear was thick in the air. They were trapped. Nowhere to run. Every can of fuel that Betelgeuse used meant less of a buffer.

It's either that or die.

He sprang into the APC, flying past Edith and Voke's unconscious body to impact the back partition, denting the blacksteel chassis with the force of his landing. The Lotuszhink girl screamed. Ignoring the pain of his dislocated shoulder, Betelgeuse grabbed two 20-liter cans of hypergolic fuel, one in each hand, then bounded back to Edith's side and hurled them at the oncoming cyborg.

The heavy polyethylene objects careened toward that hulking mass of metal.

"Fire!" Betelgeuse roared.

Edith did.

An unsettling screech emanated from the creature's voice-box-substitute, the cry consumed by a blast louder and even more powerful than that raised by its electric cannon.

The orange flame rushed backward, and Betelgeuse grabbed onto Edith and pushed her to the ground, slamming his body on top of her. The flame was hot enough that he could feel the heat even through his MDES.

The flare subsided into a thick smoke. Betelgeuse could hear screams of pain, of panic. Thete and Filippov were in the front, yelling gibberish. He pushed himself to his feet, the first thing he saw being the Lotuszhink serving-girl clutching onto her left forearm, a large patch of formerly white skin burnt pink.

"You will pay your debt!" a metallic voice erupted from behind him.

Betelgeuse turned.

The flaming monstrosity was there, grappling with the back-end of the APC and puncturing the vehicle through with its arachnoid limbs. Its prosthetic eyeball stared hatefully at Betelgeuse, while a hand was pressed into its right eye as if to protect it from the fire, though nothing organic could have escaped the heat unscathed.

No choice now. He had to go at it hard and fast.

He gathered all his strength and brandished his combat knife in his good arm, readying himself for a final leap.

The cyborg jerked its head suddenly. Then, its entire flaming body hitched. Something was pulling it out of the APC.

Metal screeched and sheared apart. The cyborg's limbs caught and tore through the APC chassis. With a savage scream, it was ripped out of the APC and sent smashing into the side of the tunnel.

Entuban Kanos, half-burnt and smoking, had grasped a massive palm around one of the cyborg's limbs. The beast of a man had pulled the cyborg off the APC with a single arm.

The pinprick laser was upon Entuban's head.

Betelgeuse was already moving, vaulting off the APC chassis and driving his good shoulder into the cyborg's side.

Thunderclap.

The bolt smashed into the ceiling and caused it to vomit rubble. The cyborg twisted its flaming torso, smashing Betelgeuse' damaged shoulder brutally into the wall and causing his world to explode in pain.

With another titanic show of strength, Entuban stepped backward and pulled, dragging the cyborg into the other wall and causing it to lose its grip on Betelgeuse.

"Its… its skull! Smash the top of its skull!" Betelgeuse roared, as loud as he could, hoping that Entuban would hear.

Entuban was swinging the cyborg like a nunchuk, smashing it into every side of the tunnel and making deep indents. Betelgeuse forced himself to his feet, but was almost doubled over by the excruciating pain in his shoulder.

To his right, he saw Douglas push himself to his feet with his prosthetic arm, his hair singed off, his features obscured by a gas mask.

A low howl reverberated through the closed space.

Betelgeuse snapped his head toward Entuban, his eyes widening with horror to see that one of the cyborg's limbs had punctured through the giant's chest, the scythe-like appendage twisting sadistically. Entuban sputtered and dropped to his knees, the cyborg's armored plating looking dented and warped but otherwise intact.

"I will bury you," the creature said, its voice dripping with inhuman hatred. It blackened limbs scraped across the floor and drove into the granite surface as it sought the traction to force Entuban's arm down. "I will carve your flesh from your bones."

Fight, coward! Fight!

Betelgeuse tightened his grip on the knife, but the pain in his shoulder made thinking difficult. He wanted to advance, but it felt like his body would fall apart if he tried to move.

You. You are perfect. Fight as long as you are alive. Struggle. Overcome.

Weakling! The opportunity is there for the taking! Make it yours!

Pain had overtaken his body. Entuban was groaning with a low and sordid sound. Entuban, the man to whom he owed his life thrice over.

A sickening sound was raised, as the metal grotesquerie tore diagonally through Entuban's chest, shearing through flesh and snapping the giant's ribs. Entuban grunted like a dying pig.

No way out. No way out but through this monster. I will overcome it or die. The strong survive and the weak are eaten. This is the truth of natural selection.

Douglas yelled and jumped onto the cyborg's back, his gas mask half melted into his face. He raised his prosthetic arm and drove it down, smashing into the center of the cyborg's skull and causing several metal bolts to fly out. The gleaming dome warped, and a discolored liquid began flowing from the seams, bubbling and steaming from contact with the cyborg's heated frame.

"Uarrgh—"

The cyborg bucked and reeled, the hand covering its eye shooting backward out of reflex and clipping Douglas in the side of his head.

Douglas crumpled to the ground soundlessly.

Intentionality leaked from the cyborg.

Betelgeuse found, in his last moments, a mosaic of the whole development of Man, writ in that powerful surge of mind-stuff—

Can the truth of the Universe be encapsulated by something so simple as natural selection?

Ah, natural selection was the great lie.

It muddied the waters, making it difficult to see how the strong were chosen.

Individual human beings were never strong. They could not survive alone. As individual nothings, Man could never have triumphed against sabertooths or bears or mammoths.

They were weak. They knew they were weak. Man created morality to bind them together into cooperation against the cruelty of life—and from this, a whole new process of selection was created.

Artificial selection. Selection of morals.

All the modern human's artificial monstrosity is no more than an attempted revolt against the aegis of the cruel god. Dead labor, ideology, politics, religion, technology, uncertainty—these forces and more have degraded the once-great ancient morality upon which Man had built all his greatest works.

From the ashes of the decided morality must come one who creates his own morality.

The Overman. Good and Evil, repurposed. Amoral to others, moral to himself and himself only.

—a chill seeped into his body and gripped his heart with fear. It felt like his soul was being dematerialized from existence, as a new and towering structure of belief sundered all things that were spiritual and immaterial from his conception-of-being.

His muscles began to twitch, slowly at first, and then increasing in intensity until he could hardly keep his flesh from vibrating. There was excitement and fear. There was anticipation and dread. He sensed a new presence within him, taking him over, possessing him.

He was reborn.

There was no more disembodied self observing him through mirrored eyes. He felt his Ash Incunabulum pulse darkly against his chest and remembered himself, remembered that Betelgeuse was not a tool or thing.

His arms were raised. The intentionalities of this cyborg were parsed of their meaning. Its Incunabula spoke to him, told him that this was Tenor Ravelash, a boy, a man, a creature forged by war, a machine created by the scions of a capitalistic technocracy.

And then the connection was attempted to be wrested from Betelgeuse.

"You think you can control me?" Tenor Ravelash seethed, staring out from its organic eye, the thing having become strangely distended.

Tenor's mind had trained itself, Betelgeuse knew. He could see what a magnificent gauntlet of pain and suffering Tenor had experienced, to have molded his mind into this iron cage of discipline.

"You came to me," Betelgeuse said. "Now I have no choice but to take your eye."

Tenor had two Incunabula, an Ash and a Primary, and both had been remade into smooth plating, with their untampered pages secreted within. Each had unique intentionality-signatures, signatures which constantly molded Tenor's mind according to its directives.

Betelgeuse laughed gaily. He was a child, playing with plasticine, finding new ways of putting things together. Tenor's Incunabula were so fascinating to explore, and he spared no effort following the pathways of the cyborg's intentionality through his scarred psyche.

And, as Betelgeuse directed the cyborg's mind-cathexis, Tenor's Incunabula hummed violently, as they were rewritten, re-etched, remade.

The last thing Tenor saw was a featureless visor staring at him, the visor turning flat and elongated and then finally blinking out of existence, as his eyeball burst from the pressure of a trillion genetic modifications all clamoring for expression at the same time.

The next to go was his brain, and it exploded out his various orifices and returned everything that was Tenor Ravelash to the entropic flows of the Universe.