In the eyes of the creatures we faced that had not altered their eyeballs to something animalistic or demonic, I saw all of the Metallic Ranks in their sclera. It did not seem to matter which one; the important factor was the strains and dosages of the elixirs they had ingested or injected into their bodies. I could divide my foes into four distinct classes, ranging from least dangerous to most. The first were Servi, whether Copper or Gold, who had taken minimal and infrequent doses of bioenhancing serums. They looked and fought mostly like humans. Second were those who were clearly abusing heavy doses of an inferior product, likely addicted to it. They were monstrous and corrupted, but not even close to our equals. Third were those who practically lived off the stuff and were alien in body shape and function, they were harder to put down and armed with more powerful weapons and gear. Fourth were the suicidally devoted who had been warped already but upon hearing the alarms triggered by our breach used potent substances that would kill them a short time later but made them a genuine struggle.

“The Chronosian edge isn’t working on the tough ones!” Caesia yelled through the commlink.

“My Silicon Daimon thinks it’s because their lifespans are so short and their transformations are inherently degenerative despite making them stronger,” Dio said. “They are as mortal as a mayfly in terms of longevity, but that flaw isn’t just a bug here, it’s a feature. The Chronosian effect can’t do jack against something that is by nature cancerous and self-destructive and that is powered by their mutation.”

I grit my teeth as a mess of fused limbs and writhing tentacles scraped at my breastplate with its yellowed claws and latched onto me with octopus-like appendages. No matter how I ripped chunks of its rotting, tumorlike flesh off, it did not die. There was no central brain or organs in this thing, everything was spread out and redundant throughout its structure, the neurons and kidneys and cardiac muscle distributed all through its disgusting body. The monster was hideous, there was nothing left for me to latch onto for some kind of understand of who they once were. I could not tell what their gender or Metallic Rank or face or body type had been before they had taken the plunge and sealed their fate with a syringe or a pill.

“I can’t get this damn thing off me!” I grunted as I tore into it and raked my blade across my chest. The damn thing just reformed and regrew more tentacles and limbs the more I injured it like the head of a hydra growing back once severed.

“Hit it harder.” Andarias suggested over the commlink.

I rolled my eyes.

“I think I have a potential solution,” Alsig said inside my head, the AI examining the situation through my eyes.

What’s that?” I thought to her.

“I can hack into your Keenblade and fiddle with the molecular disruption field generator in the hilt. I can supercharge and overclock it so that the atomic bond dissolution is more intense. The problem is that it will knock out the generator for a minute and fourteen seconds.” Alsig said.

I thought quickly. In an all-out brawl between Imperators and mutants that broke the sound barrier in our clashes, a minute and fourteen seconds was a long, long time.

Do it. I decided.

“Push your blade into the Servus and hold it there, we don’t want to waste any of the effect.” She said.

I stabbed into it with my coppery blade.

“Initiating,” My AI said.

There was a popping noise and my Keenblade vibrated like a tuning fork and then the tentacle monster exploded into grey dust. I noticed that the effect had taken off the black paint of my breastplate as well as a millimeter of the alloy beneath.

Batting away a man with crab pinchers and shark teeth with my left hand, I used my less effective sword more as a club than a proper sword, caving in skulls until the Servi monsters stopped arising from the clutches of death for more.

I kicked a female creature through several walls until she was beyond my view.

“Move on to the next stage, leave any stragglers behind. We have bigger fish to fry.” Dio ordered.

As if synchronized, we jumped a few feet into the air and then our Adamantplate’s mass and weight sent us sailing down through three floors where we refocused and gathered our bearings in the brief, infinitesimal moments before the enhanced guards of this floor realized that the attackers were right in front of them.

Their eyes widened, some reptilian, some goat-like, some still mostly human, and one man who had grown a turtle shell covered in metallic porcupine spikes dropped a cup of coffee in shock.

Then they swarmed us.

Knocking teeth out and thwacking enemies with my inactive blade, I found myself next to Kato in the rush and chaos of the situation.

“You doing okay, buddy?” I asked him.

“Just fine,” He grunted with effort as he beheaded a bullheaded warrior.

“Molecular disruption is back online.” Alsig said with a pleased tone in her voice.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Andarias bring up his heavy boot to crush the ribcage of a fish scaled man.

“He’s going to-“ Alsig tried to get out.

And then Andarias brought his hefty, oversized foot, clad in dense plate, down on his target and, by extension, the floor. The floor split into a chasm and rumbled like there was an earthquake. Solid ground fell out beneath us and the Servi and our strike force fell through the floor, our masses carrying us further down than our foes.

Lying flat on his back in a human shaped depression in the floor, Dio sighed.

“My bad.” Andarias said sheepishly.

“It’s fine. We needed to move faster anyways. There’s an elevator shaft we can take straight down to the commander of this rebel fortress.” Dio said.

He led us to it and wrenched the doors open and then stepped off into the shaft, dropping out of sight. The rest of us followed our leader.

We fell for a long time and then punched through the ceiling of the cavern the leader of these Servi was holed up in, like a bear in its den.

The cavern was warm, would be scorching to lesser beings, probably because Iulius’s geothermal manipulation did not extend here fully. There was technology and signs of life everywhere, from left over food sitting half eaten to holo-monitors still open with data reports and messages displayed, but there was only one person left in here.

He could not have hidden from us, though it was clear he did not care to even try, because the man was massive even as he slouched on his throne carved from the cavern’s stone. Alsig scanned him and estimated his standing height would be eight feet and 9 inches. Bigger than a full grown Campeador. He was a giant, titanic and gargantuan, but he was not monstrous or hideous like the foot soldiers he had sent before him in waves in an attempt to drown us in corrupted blood and mutated flesh. No, this commander seemed to fit the human ideal of sculpted perfection, only sized up beyond normal proportions. I would even say that he was beautiful, an unusual assessment for me to make about another man, but his face looked like it was carved and painted by a master artist and sculpter as his magnum opus.

Curiously, the Metal in his eyes was Copper.

The Servi giant smiled. “Greetings, oppressors. Are you ready to die?”

Dio sent me a private message on my screen, typed by his Daimon. It read: Do not use your fire berserker form before I signal you.

“On the contrary,” Dio said, broadcasting his voice through his helm’s outside speakers. “We have come to deliver you to the Ferryman, by order of my father.”

The giant raised in eyebrow in confusion. “Your father?”

Then his expression darkened to a glower. “Ah. A Claudion. How delightful. I was going to make this quick, but now I’ll just have to savor this.”

One moment he was seated on the throne and the next he was in the middle of us. Nothing that big should move that fast, the Campeadors being relatively slow in movement speed and regeneration compared to Imperators and lacking psychic powers were the only things that prevented them from being one-man armies capable of going toe to toe with a Silver Imperator. That this gigantic man could be quicker than us was more than unfair, it should be impossible.

“Adrias!” My Silicon Daimon tried to warn me, but the giant’s backhanded slap knocked me off my feet and into the side of the cavern. There were dents in my armor from his dismissive slap, his hand leaving an impression of itself in my ultradense, ultradurable alloyed plate. My head spun.

“Everyone link Daimons and armor sensors to each other’s Ais.” Dio commanded, his voice strained. Using his windform from Hermes let him move as fast as the giant, but Dio could not hit the alchemically enhanced man while he was transmuted into air, nor could he communicate with us while transformed.

I charged the giant, using psychic physio-augmentation to boost my strength and speed. Problem was that power did not increase my mental speed or reflexes to compensate and I found myself just missing the giant several times.

“Alright!” Thorania said as we gave our artificial intelligences permission to link and combine their energies and computing.

“Daimons, pool processing power and perform a behavioral analysis to generate a close quarters combat prediction algorithm.” Dio said.

I felt a buzzing in my head as Alsig complied with the order. Then graphics and precognitive predictions filled a section of my vision. Working together, we managed a stalemate with the mutated experiment. He was bigger and stronger and faster, but we were more numerous and with our Silicon Daimons coordinating our actions, we were like a hivemind with the power of an Oracle. Unfortunately, our Chronosian edges on our blades still did not work. The giant did not look like he was rotting away from the inside or degenerating into primordial ooze, but apparently his lifespan was still short enough that our time accelerators did nothing of value.

The giant increased the temp and more of us were taking strikes that knocked us around like dolls and deformed armor that was supposed to be indestructible.

“Adrias.” Dio said. “Now’s the time to activate the godfire. Don’t lose control.”

Keeping my mental and emotional instability while using the pyre of Heracles, I reduced the intensity of my psychic augmentation, and then started to set my innards ablaze, starting with boiling my blood and igniting the star that would replace my heart. Confidence and aggression filled me, and I bared my teeth like a feral dog. This was it. Nothing would stop me now-

And then Alsig started to scream like she was being stabbed over and over.

“Stopstopstopstop!” She wailed. I felt pain radiating from her.

I dimmed the power of Heracles’s funeral pyre.

“Firstie? Now’s the time to pull out the power of a god.” Dio said. “I need you moving.”

“Something’s wrong with Alsig.” I explained.

What’s wrong? I said to her internally.

“When you do that, it burns, it burns like the sun.” She said, her voice broken and trembling. “You’ll melt me to molten metal if you use it.”

“Adrias! I need you to use your power!” Dio said, frustrated.

“I can’t! Alsig isn’t protected when I use it! I’ll destroy her.” I said over the commlink.

I dodged a sweeping kick from the gargantuan Servus.

“So hurry up and do it and we’ll get you another Daimon.” Dio said, exasperated.

I thought of how she had screamed. How real she had sounded, how deep the pain had felt.

“I can’t do it. I can’t kill her.” I said firmly.

“Thank you. Thank you, Adrias.” Alsig wept in my mind.

“I am ordering you as your commanding Strategos!” Dio shouted.

“I won’t do it.” I said. I took a hit that partially caved in my left shoulder pauldron.

“Olympas Above!” Dio snarled as we fought on.

Then the giant made a move our combat predictor had not anticipated, and he seized hold of Pollixa and wrenched off her helmet and then crushed her head. Her body dropped to the ground, lifeless.

“No!” Dio screamed and raised his freehand to shoot emerald lightning bolts that raked the giant’s chest.

“Shit!” Antonias said.

“Gods!” Thorania said in horror.

“Godsdamnit, Adrias! Use your power!” Dio snarled.

“Please. Please. Please, don’t kill me, I don’t want to burn to death. It hurt so bad, Adrias.” Alsig begged me.

“Do it, Adrias!” Caesia shouted.

“Now!” Clodias yelled out through the commlink. “Do it now!”

In the end I did nothing, and we kept fighting until the giant’s lifespan ran out and he fell like timber to the ground, shaking it. Most of the others went to Pollixa’s body while Dio, Quartias and I watched the augmented Servus take his last breaths. I drew close to the giant’s face, still radiant and handsome even as life left him.

He stared at me, his eyes not quite focusing on my face.

“You used to be a Servus, didn’t you? I can see that in your soul.” He whispered quietly.

I stepped back and looked to see if anyone had heard but it seemed everyone else was distracted.

Then he collapsed into dust: muscle, skin, bone, everything went to grey grains.

We pulled off our helmets to breathe unfiltered air, but none of the others would look at me.

I stared at Pollixa’s headless corpse. She had been one of the Helots under my command at the Scholarium.

“I’m sorry.” Alsig said in a small voice.

I didn’t know what to say, both to her and to the others. What I had understood was that there was a simulation of a human mind running on the chip in my brain, and it sure seemed like she was a full person, not just recorded lines running on a script. I had felt what she felt at least. Was that worth a human life though? A Bronze Imperator’s life? The others on my team certainly did not think so. I didn’t know that Pollixa was going to die, had not made an intentional tradeoff between the two, but I was still responsible for her death.

…

Days had passed after our debrief and the events of the mission, but the others refused to talk to me. All except one.

Quartias Fulvion.

It was a cold comfort that the person I strongly suspected had some kind of personality disorder was the only one willing to associate with me, but I found that it was better than being alone.