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283 - The Second One [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2025-06-15 20:37:43 +0000 UTCEventually, after five or perhaps six rounds, she came to a rest near the very platform from which she had disembarked those months ago. It had collapsed into the pit since then. In fact, she could swear Jas’raba’s edge was in a far worse condition than before. Large boulders had crashed down, smashing buildings and blocking even more of the streets. Only the corpse pile in the very center remained untouched.
She had intended to sit down at the edge and peer into the pit, but now that she was here, she felt it a foolish idea. Who knew whether her weight would cause another section of the pit rim to collapse. Besides, the Arion made for a supremely comfortable seat.
Thus, astride the automaton that had deemed itself Rocinante, she looked down into the desolate pit, whose downward spiral could in its own way could be interpreted as an inverted Tower of Babel, the pile of corpses as its dome, and the World Needle its ultimate zenith.
Krahe considered Favonia’s advice, that of formulating a poem based on her existing maxims to better help her discern and solidify the missing two. The meaning came easily, at first, but the lines were too crude, and never satisfied her. She mentally reworked the poem time and time again over the course of the next hour or so until she felt it somewhat accurately captured her four maxims of Will to Might, Hatred of Evil, the ideal of the lost hometown, and, somehow, the fourth maxim which she couldn’t properly conceptualize in words. That had been the easy part, now came the ordeal of fishing up the last two. The more she dwelt on the last two control rods, the more her thoughts insisted on returning to that place. Neo Babylonia. Not the real place, but the mental construct through which she had journeyed, to that moment in the hovercar. The ruins of Jas’raba yawning below her only made the feeling stronger.
“And the world will be better for this, that one man, scorned and covered with scars, still strove with his last ounce of courage, to- touch the untouchable, break the unbreakable…”
In some way, the World Needle could indeed touch the untouchable and break the unbreakable. Regardless of the Jas’raba Civilization’s culture, one had to admit the needle was a majestic thing in its own right, even if not quite on the same level as the Banishment Wheel. Surface-level knowledge of the machine’s operation wasn’t exactly restricted — it was so embedded in mythology that trying to smother it would’ve only backfired, and nobody had the tools or the knowledge of its operation, so the churches had resigned to simply keeping an eye on it. That Audun Sorun eventually got it to work was too absurd an outlier to blame them for it, and Krahe was living proof of how well it had worked. She had come to realize that the six-eyed dream serpent had shown him to her, in that Sector 5 alleyway. Who else in all Megacity Gamma would speak of Chernobog and Jas’raba, and in Audunpoint’s exact dialect of the Neocalbian language no less? She was somehow absolutely certain that, wherever he was, he was likely doing well. Perhaps he had wrought an empire of scrap for himself, wielding magic he ought not to have, or perhaps absurdly powerful psionics. Who knew. His struggle, in some way, could be said to be the same as hers, if not in its target, then in its madness. Whether he kept chasing immortality even in Megacity Gamma, she couldn’t guess.
As she continued to mull things over, considering how true the mashed-together lyrics might be in regards to her, she also couldn’t help but think back to something else. She couldn’t help but think back to Barzai’s tirade during her battle with Semzar, because it was true. Every word of it had been the truth and nothing but the truth.
In her youth she had, indeed, slain thirty men with her bare hands. She had, indeed, strangled one of them with his own polymer intestines, she had strung their heads from the rafters, and so too had she drowned three among their number in a vat of off-white synthetic blood. By her own hands, she had forced open a steel bulkhead, bursting her own arms in the process, thus forcing her to bite out the throats of the choppergang members who had awaited at the other side.
It had been the earliest of her major endeavors, In retrospect, one could say that what she had done in Audunpoint was to some extent an unintentional re-enactment of that time.
Barzai’s account of her actions in the City of Angels was no less true, from her destruction of Whitestone supporters’ corporate bunkers, the toppling of their personal skyscrapers, and the cruel fates to which she had consigned them when she found the locations of their data-tombs. The gruesome implement that was the nerve lathe was matched in cruelty only by its efficiency in unspooling a mind into raw, inert data. It was also the only method of extracting information from brains as thoroughly borgified and fortified as those of her victims at that time.
Even that, however, paled in comparison to her devastation of domed villas of Xiaosheng following her acquisition of the Blackhands. Barzai’s account remained entirely truthful even here — she had, indeed, irradiated the arcology and filled it with the ultra-persistent nerve agent Cobalt 8. Not out of practicality, but to send a message. Blowing up the arcology would’ve worked just as well, the radiation and nerve agent had been a reversion of what had been done to her home town. Her direct killing of the arcology’s direct owners and their personal security details was almost a footnote by comparison.
Frankly, the events Barzai had included in his tirade during the raid didn’t account for even one-fifth of her past life’s body count. Killing had just been a part of life back then, to the point it merited distinguishing between now and then. A couple gangsters or serial killers here and there was nothing. On average, people could take an order of magnitude more punishment, even with bare-minimum barriers and wards.
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A/N: Chapter title reference: The Second One
