Her head toppled from her shoulders.
When her killer picked up her disembodied head and placed it so that she had a good view of the city, saying that he was sorry, that it was for his family… Only then did the reality of her betrayal sink in. He’d been bought by the same scum who had turned her home to radioactive glass.
Krahe. That had been her name.
In the moment her head was severed from her body, a chain of Dead Man Switches embedded in her cybernetics went off. Among them, turning her body into an autonomous humanoid weapon was the first. The local news cycle that night ran wild with reports of a rampaging “cyber-zombie”.
As the man who she had trusted and who had betrayed her met his end at the radiation-blasters embedded in her arms, the second of Krahe’s Dead Man Switches went off.
The rotten, corporate heart of Megacity Gamma, and with it the HQ of the Whitestone and Bergmann Financial Group… It all went up in nuclear hellfire. Such was the scale and resilience of corporate megastructures; nothing less than a fusion bomb would have sufficed. The megacity’s intranet followed when the last Dead Man Switch activated: a self-replicating AI was unleashed, running rampage through any system even slightly related to Whitestone.
These were the treasures of a woman who had lived through corporate wars and cataclysms without number, who had stood against the closest thing her world had to gods.
The three curses of a righteous warrior whom her own world had rejected.
Brunhilde Krahe died with the image of a nuclear fireball of her own making, burned into her artificial eyes’ corneas. With the last shred of backup power in her head, the cyborg rumbled out her final words.
“I. AM. NOT. DONE…”
She died filled with regret and refusal, for this was a scene she had never wanted to see. The only reason she hadn’t done this of her own volition, why this was a Dead Man Switch to begin with, was the knowledge that the true masterminds of Whitestone would just prop up another finance group in another city with even tighter corporate security.
“It was all for nothing…”
A truth she could not accept, hoping even unto death that her act would at least stir another like herself into action. She hoped that eventually, the subhuman parasites behind the likes of Whitestone would be strung up from their own ivory towers as they rightly deserved.
Those who had killed her thus met the same fate, even if she was not there to see it. No, Krahe had long departed for the timeless journey through the cosmic void between worlds, only to be snatched up by the whims of cosmic coincidence.
Amidst the vast emptiness of the void between worlds, a consciousness stirred; a being as ancient as the worlds of man, those motes of light which speckled this boundless nothing. It heard the call of a defiant soul cut down on the cusp of greatness, a soul which so vehemently rejected its own death that its cries echoed across the cosmic void of Kenoma and stirred Chernobog from its timeless slumber.
Chernobog was called many things. A god of ruin. Misfortune. Apocalypse. It was no such thing.
A god of ego, ambition, the peaceless search for ever greater heights. These, it was a god of.
It snatched the errant soul, binding it within itself, and drifted back to its ageless sleep. An eon passed, over the course of which an infinitesimal shred of Chernobog’s being seeped into the soul of Brunhilde Krahe. It was an infinitesimal fragment of the Old God’s knowledge and power, equating to less than a drop of water amid a bottomless ocean, a singular grain of sand in a boundaryless desert.
In the subterranean capital of a civilization long-gone there stood an ancient holy site, now desecrated, turned to the laboratory of a madman. The stern faces of forgotten kings and gods looked down upon a sorry display: An old, once-great man desperately squeezed the venom gland of an arm-sized, lamprey-like worm into a syringe. Filling it the rest of the way with blue-glowing elixir from a beaker, he injected himself with its contents.
The terrible pain which had wracked him was carried away on a comforting wave of numbness, the innumerable bulging seams of his pieced-together form receding into no more than lines on his skin. His mind grew foggy and the beaker slipped from his grasp, smashing on the brass-inlaid floor.
“At this rate, I shall lose myself before the year is out… Come on Audun, get a hold of yourself…” he thought, listlessly glancing about. All this machinery, all this equipment. It was all worth a fortune, and it had utterly failed him in trying to awaken the ancient city’s machinery.
That wretched substance, the venom of a Baneworm, was the only thing which could suppress his affliction, born from centuries of careless fleshgrafting and self-experimentation. Oh, how he hated his younger self for disregarding the warnings of those who held the grafting arts in reverence. He had thought that his raw genius would allow him to just deal with it later, that he could use alchemy and magic to achieve immortality through brute force. The reward for his hubris was a body actively trying to pull itself apart, a body that could not be saved even by the highest masters of the grafting arts, or so they claimed. His brain was being dissolved alive by the same venom that kept his symptoms under control, his mastery of alchemy the sole reason he wasn’t yet a vegetable.
He glanced to his right, to his writing desk, and he reached beneath the vast sheafs of paper, pulling a gun from underneath it all. It was beautiful, a century-old work of craftsmanship that still stood head and shoulders above modern firearms. Audun took a clip full of rounds and pressed it into the gun, working the ringed lever next to its trigger to chamber one. He considered taking the easy way out, albeit briefly.
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