Published at 15th of January 2026 7:40 am

Chapter polymechanus 17.3

This chapter is updated by JustRead.pl

A hundred billion hands, caustic and clammy and long-gone corpse-cold, clamped tight to the curve of a naked neck.

Awareness blossomed broad and deep, flowing outward through a far-flung filigree of a million wide-stretched eyes. Heat maps, infra-red light, echolocation, synaesthetic feedback of touch and scent and taste, vibrations processed into visible networks of sound; nanomachine density, wind-speed and pressure, moisture and humidity, the dark halos of ultraviolet, the curving seduction of radio waves, night-vision blotted out by the strangled sun; lidar and radar and sonar and a dozen-dozen-dozen spectra of seeing and knowing in ways no human language had invented words for, not by the time when words had become superfluous.

Broken fingers scraped and scrabbled at the rear of a cracked skull, worming deeper into a space too small for even one solitary digit. A hundred thousand muscle groups contracted and expanded in grand and blind-struck union, dark-thick chemical soup sluicing between each fibre and cell; the joints of ten thousand bodies turned and twisted and locked at once, cartilage supple as new-born plastic, synovial fluid a hot black oil. Every angle was understood and remembered, every motion made in reference to every other movement, every next step seen in retrospect from ten moments ahead. Grave-filth aeons old poured in through a wound, squeezing brains tight against thin and fleshy membranes. Thousands of firing solutions and munition arcs and impact predictions flared and flashed and focused together, the decisions and calculations twitching like peristalsis in the universal gut.

Infinity was never meant for the human mind; this was not even that, she knew. But it was the closest any human being could ever get, without losing themselves in a sea of souls.

But still despite all her superhuman qualities, the genetic editing which made her stronger, faster, more decisive, less easily shaken, hardened against panic and despair and grief and pain she was still losing.

She could not remember her own name.

With a heave of effort she tore herself free from the hands at her neck, trailing sticky streamers of darkly steaming black. Sight clicked back into place. The external world made sense for a micro-second of real time.

A muscle twitched inside the truncated ruin of a right arm her right arm? In response, all her distant bodies swept forward across the ruined landscape, a rolling tide of liquid muscle armoured by imperishable diamond. Broken concrete and shredded mold fell before her like fog parted by a blade. The invaders at the periphery of her body scattered in wild retreat.

One, two, three, four, five five points of contact, five foreign objects to eject and destroy. Wasnt there meant to be a sixth? Yes, there was number six, hanging back, far back, already wounded and pained. A seventh as well? Yes, that one was flowing beneath the substrate of the world, seeking a suitable entry-point to be reborn in matter and flesh. She twitched an eyeball at that thought a hundred eyeballs, narrowing the targeting of their electromagnetic pulse disruption. That invader would not be allowed to resurface, it would be kept out of this fight.

She opened her mouth, to warn who? what? somebody that wasnt her but then realised she no longer knew how to speak.

A hundred billion hands grasped the back of her neck again, tight and dead and undeniable. They hauled her off her feet and dragged her beneath a surface black as old tar.

Reality faded out, lost beyond the surface of the infinite dark sea, choking off the taste of rotten air.

She knew it was not the hands fault. She forgave them even as they drowned her in their desperation. They only wished to live, climbing her by pure instinct, using her as a life raft to reach the surface. But there were too many of them, a dark infinity too heavy for the natural buoyancy of her single body.

Im not you! she tried to cry out. Im not all of you, Im

Black waters flooded her mouth, gushed down her throat, filling her lungs, her stomach, her intestines, her bowels, her veins and capillaries, the spaces between her cells.

Her name drowned in the black.

The hundred billion hands embraced her, soft and longing, cradling her skull with gentle insistence. They wrapped strong limbs around her belly and hips, drew her deeper, held her tight in mutual embrace. The black waters were warm and welcoming; she realised that this was the only true category to which she had ever belonged, the only universal medium, the only place where there was no more division into us and them, into predator and prey, into those who left and those who were lost. She wished so dearly to be one with her sisters, didnt she? She wanted to climb back inside their bodies, twenty five squalling apes compressed back into one cell inside the home of their artificial womb. And this was the only way such an end could ever be achieved. No more cold, no more dark, no more separation. Each other and each other and each other, all the billions who had lived or would ever have lived, together at last. She wanted her cadre

Howl. Metris. Silla. Vari. Third. Kit. Daysalt. Shade. Orchid. Arry. Bug. Ipeka. Velvet. Kos. Fii. Snow. Here. Dusk. Scoria. Yeva. Try. Asp. Quio. Emi.

Her name was drowned, but those would never leave.

Her clade-sisters were not here. They died too long ago.

Arrrrghhh! she roared and fought and thrashed herself free a second time, plunging upward from the grave of dark welcome, spluttering as she surfaced from the black.

Reality crashed into her, smeared sideways against a million rolling eyeballs. She was not drowning in a black soup made from her entire species she was racing over a broken landscape. She was not a single body sunk in fluid; she was several thousand bodies of artificial nanomachine muscle spinning up more firepower than this planet had seen in aeons.

No. That wasnt right. Was it? She wasnt many. She was one.

She was a marker-light, a mote of flesh, riding the crest of the wave.

A voice howled in the back of her mind, shouting hope, hope, hope over and over. Hope, hope, hope.

But she could not spare any attention for the philosophical work of self-examination. On the right side of her bodies, the engagement was about to begin.

The moment had arrived, calculated and counted down to the exact millisecond the point at which the intruders would assume she could go no further. A spiral pattern of plans flowered inside her mind, an exhaustive outline for her use of weapons.

Two of the Necromancers! Necromancers, yes, that was the word were skidding to a second halt. She had chased them for miles across the homogeneous grey-black landscape, herding them in a specific pattern, keeping them from approaching the precious payload sheltered near her centre. Now all five intruders were turning and slowing, swimmers who thought they had reached the shore, safe in the knowledge they could forget the waves.

She grinned, breathing hard as a steam engine, drooling black blood between her teeth. Somebody else grinned with her. A hundred billion corpses grinned at her rear.

Fire! she spat.

Her bodies of black muscle and imperishable diamond unleashed the opening volley; no warning shots, no ranging or testing or probing for weakness. A wall of firepower roared forth, a blast wave slamming into the pair of slowing Necromancers. The element of surprise won her two instant, clean, total kills; both Necromancers were shredded in an eye-blink, their bodies turned to dust, their atoms mixed with a plume of pulverised concrete.

She roared with the rush of fleeting victory, a million throats shaking the air in unison.

Her bodies were already cycling-up the main thrust of her weaponry. This opening volley was nothing more than a statement of intent. he slavered and panted at what she had prepared.

A tiny voice crackled in the back of her head short-range encrypted radio.

mmander, fucking hell! By Lunas soil in my mouth, warn us before the next salvo! Pheiri barely compensated for the shock-wave of all that

She recognised the speaker, but she had lost the name. Somebody small and angry and expert.

Pheiri, though, that name she had retained, because Pheiri was the reason she was unlimbering such apocalyptic firepower. Pheiri was the payload sheltered near her core, rushing across the landscape just ahead of her wave. Her little brother.

She tried to reply to the message. When she opened her mouth to speak, black gunk flowed up and out of her lungs. She forgot how to use words, forgot the purpose of communication, began to forget herself again.

No not yet! She had to stay in control, she had to see this through. The pair of Necromancers she had disrupted were already re-extruding fresh instantiations from the swirling cloud of particulate. Her other senses saw their insides, the parts of them flowering open across the invisible skein of the network their permissions and limitations shunting to emergency response, because she had overstepped her carefully defined boundaries. She had declared open war, and now her foe was arming for the consequences. The other Necromancers responded similarly, skidding to a halt amid the mess of concrete and mold, turning to face the wave of her body, expanding what they were allowed to do.

But she would win any slugging match. Her old foe knew what she was capable of when roused, and that she could not be over-matched.

Black worms wriggled inside her head, coating the surface of her brain, curling themselves into the wrinkles and whorls. She could not direct this next step herself, it was too much for the marker-light. She needed

A hundred billion hands surged from behind, overwhelmed her in an instant, pulled her back beneath black waves of oblivion.

Third time lucky.

Her sense of self had eroded too far for her to fight free; the hands were too insistent, too tight around her neck and waist and hips, the black waters themselves too welcoming, too warm, too much like inevitable home. The fight, the real fight, out on the surface of reality, crashed on without her; shock waves of explosion and EMP and gravitic engine backwash shivered the surface of the thick and tarry sea.

But she barely felt it. The hands were dragging her down now, into the deep black where she would forever belong.

She closed her eyes, allowed herself to be taken. Pheiri, her cadre, Telokopolis; it would all survive, without her. The fight would still be won, without her. After this there would be no resurrection, not for her, for she was not dying. Her name had become one with the sea. She was going home.

Home?

No. Home is Telokopolis.

A fresh pair of hands scrabbled at her front.

Small and sharp and fast, rough and painful, nails clawing at her flesh, unlike all the others. A voice she knew as well as her own called down into the black, a howl of a voice, howling a name she could not remember.

But the howl was not enough, too muffled by the weight of the eternal dead. It could slow her descent, but could not pull her free.

She wanted so very badly to invite that howling voice down into the dark alongside her; togetherness, never to be parted, never to be apart, never again, forever and ever. But she still retained enough of herself to remember the howler above had a task all her own. Once the battle was over, the enemy would not be fully defeated, and the howlers new skills would be required.

She took the new hands and peeled them away from her body. She tried to let go, to let the howling voice know it was okay, this was what she wanted, she was going to be one with all that had ever been or ever was or ever will be. The Howl would not let go, clinging to her hands, nails digging in, but she was too weak to stop this, too weak to

Another pair of hands joined, hot and urgent.

And another. And another.

And another.

On and on and on, pulling against the sucking current of the black, against the hundred billion souls in the sea of thought. Twenty four pairs of hands grasped her by wrists and arms and shoulders and waist and hips and thighs and ankles and throat and cunt and jaw and skull.

And ripped her free.

Ahhhh! Elpida gasped, staggering upright on a black and dripping shore, in a void from nowhere. Wha what

Howl slapped her across the face, so hard Elpida reeled sideways. Elpida grabbed her own cheek with one hand, Howls shoulder with the other; two hands, so this wasnt real, this was more simulation?

Elpida! Howl screamed. Elps! Elps, look at me! Elpida!

Howl was naked and covered in black slime, as was Elpida. Howl was crying, weeping openly, clawing at Elpidas front so hard it left red welts down her skin.

Youre not allowed, youre not allowed to go! Howl wailed. You keep doing this! Youre not allowed to leave me behind like that, never, never again, never

Elpida looked around, but there was nobody but Howl. A black void stretched off to infinity, with perhaps a hint of glowing blue on a paradoxically eternal horizon. Behind her lay a black sea, a billion hands writhing beneath the surface.

Howl, Elpida said. Where is everybody?

She spoke the question in clade-cant, with a word for everybody which applied only to the cadre, to their sisters, to nobody beyond their flesh and blood.

Howl stopped wailing, eyes wide and red. everybody?

I felt I forgot who I was, Elpida shook her head, struggling to catch up; she had to catch up, because there was a battle to win. We were fools to think the graveworm was so simple, just a woman in a room somewhere. Shes billions, billions of minds. I almost lost myself inside her. But then I felt everybody. All their hands on me. Not just you.

Howl blinked, then looked left and right. Its just me here, Elps. And you cant ever do that again

Its alright, Howl. I remember who I am now. But she shook her head. We cant stay here. The fight, the real one, how is it

A distant rumble shook the void, a far-away detonation so deep it made Elpidas bowels and eyeballs vibrate.

Howl cracked a grin through her drying tears. Sounds pretty rockin, right? Wanna go see?

Elpida swept Howl up in her arms, naked bodies pressed skin-to-skin. Lets

01110011 01110101 01110010 01100110 01100001 01100011 01100101

01110011 01110101 01110010 01100110 01100001 01100011 01100101

01110011 01110101 01110010 01100110 01100001 01100011 01100101

Reality snapped back with perfect clarity.

Elpidas physical body was right where shed left it standing atop the back of a worm-guard, at the centre of the crashing wave, cresting over the landscape of broken concrete and black mold. She was anchored by the muscle and nerve of the worm-guard itself, wrapped around her left arm and plugged directly into the stump of her right. Her upper right arm and the right side of her chest were freezing cold, as if invaded by filaments of ice, but still supple and mobile and healthy, as far as she could tell. Her neck and head felt much the same, frozen inside, joined together with the graveworms distributed nervous system.

The back of her neck was slit open where her spine met her skull. The wound was crammed with the wriggling black muscle and nerve of the worm-guard; she could feel tiny tendrils stroking the inside of her skull, crawling across the surface of her brain, interfacing with her neural lace.

Elpida clenched tight on the urge to vomit. At least the pain was minimal, numbed down to almost nothing.

Her connection with the graveworm gifted her a vague awareness of the position and condition and current action of every single worm-guard that comprised the ast swarm, the same way her natural body knew the position of her own hands and feet. She knew that the swarm had lost three hundred and twenty five worm-guard in the last sixteen minutes and fifty two seconds. She knew the ammunition production statistics for thousands of miniature nano-forges pumping rounds into the air. She knew the estimated next actions of the five hostiles five Necromancers as they darted and whirled and exploded across the landscape ahead of the line.

It was akin to piloting a combat frame, but magnified a thousand times.

No living human could have survived this improvised uplink; she doubted any other extant revenant could have done so either. Even now the pressure of awareness threatened to plunge her back into an infinite black sea, but she felt Howls embrace shoring up her mind.

Elps! Howl shouted in her head. Elps, shit me upside down, look at this! Hahahahaaaaa! How are we even alive in all this shit!?

Elpida did not have to ask what Howl meant.

The worm-guards full firepower the graveworms counter-attack was boiling the earth and scorching the air, turning the already churned corpse-city into a living inferno.

A vast forward swathe of concrete and black mold was being flash-cooked by lines of searing bright-white explosions and coherent beam-weapons stitched across the landscape, turning the substrate of the city into pools of superheated metal, clouds of pulverised dust, and a sea of blackened lava; the destruction stretched from horizon to horizon, throwing up mountain ranges of debris, rolling tidal waves of flame, crashing landslides of melted rock and concrete. The sky was gone, choked out completely, the sun not even a reddish memory. Elpida felt tiny, a mote of flesh surrounded by godlike fury.

Her connection with the graveworms nervous system whispered the nature of this barrage in the back of her head atomics and antimatter, single-grain positron weaponry. This was the lightest tap with the greatest sledgehammer of pre-Telokopolan Earth.

Behind the cataclysmic barrage, the worm-guard kept working. The cooling earth was further pulverised into clouds of dust by billion-round solid-slug volleys from a wall of conventional weaponry, the air itself more lead than open space. Plasma discharges drowned outcroppings of twisted steel in torrents of purple energy. The air crackled and pulsed with eddies and currents of EMP discharge individual worm-guard turning specialised weaponry on the tiny darting dots of the Necromancers, trying to pin them down, herding them into a predictable pattern. Elpidas guts shook with the backwash of nearby gravitic engines, waves of debris and even explosions themselves shunted left and right by the worm-guards internal projectors. Weaponry she couldnt identify cut through the chaos spheres of crumpled red that appeared from nowhere, taking massive chunks out of the ground, vanishing as if they were never present. Even the graveworms wordless presence in the back of her mind could not explain those. That technology had come long after the graveworms own creation.

Sheer sound and fury threatened to blind and deafen Elpida; nothing could survive out there, it was akin to the surface of the sun. The worm-guard on which she rode had somehow erected a bubble-dome of diamond around her, a thick barrier of glassy armour. The living diamond blackened here and there to protect her eyes, muffling the apocalyptic roar.

Pheiri was right below her, partially sheltered by the bulk of the worm-guard, his tracks whirring at maximum speed, flinging him forward across the disintegrating landscape. His shields were up, layers of blue and white crackling and flickering as they weathered the backwash from the rolling wave of titanic destruction. Somehow the worm-guard were using their gravitic engines to pound out a roughly flat path ahead of Pheiri.

Iriko rode on Pheiris back, out on his upper deck, crammed tight to his bone-armour, her refractive scales turned to a reflective mirror finish. Lykke had clambered up to Pheiris turret, eyes wide at the battle, her blonde hair and white dress whipped by the wind; her hair was singed, tips on fire, skin blackened and burned, but she didnt seem to notice. Her jaw hung open.

Elpida couldnt blame Lykke for staring. She didnt understand either. This battle was beyond her.

How were the Necromancers still alive?

Five figures somehow endured, mobile rocks amid the nightmare chaos of firepower; the sixth Necromancer, the Black-Iron Raven, had apparently decided against returning to the fight. The seventh Perpetua still waited on the horizon, invisible to Elpidas naked eyes now, but sighted clearly in the subconscious data-feeds in the back of her head.

The Necromancers had shed any pretence of human form, exploding themselves into whirling mass of flesh and bone, vortexes of living metal, gyrating maelstroms of bleeding crimson muscle studded by spiked wheels of articulated keratin. They seemed akin to how Lykke had transformed herself inside the network, the mass of raw flesh that she had become to fight the Silico. But these Necromancers were on a different scale, working at a hundred times the speed. At one moment they were tens of meters across, in the next they were blasted to a sheen of cooked blood and molten metal by the firepower from the worm-guard; a split second later they would reform into floating globules of bloody meat, spreading themselves back out again. Elpida watched in muted awe as one Necromancer was hit directly by a white beam from a worm-guard single antimatter grains in a protective sheath; the Necromancer exploded into gas. A split-second later it re-formed from the air, from debris, from dust, pulling itself back together like a sun being born in a stellar nursery.

Inexhaustible firepower rained down on infinitely plastic pseudo-biology, neither able to truly overwhelm the other.

Neither were the Necromancers limited only to a fighting retreat. Every few seconds one of the five would dart toward the wave of worm-guard turned into a lance of living bone or a cartwheel of gigantic limbs or a whip of acid and crash into the onrushing wave, tearing a handful of the machines limb from limb, sundering the diamond armour with explosive percussion, shredding the black meat inside with whips of barbed bone, using the eviscerated corpse as momentary cover.

Elpida felt each loss, each death, as a little pinprick of pain. The worm-guard were not mindless machines, they felt and thought on their own level, even if they were only like cells to the graveworm itself.

More worm-guard rushed in to fill the gaps each time, forcing the Necromancers into continued retreat.

How long was I under? Elpida shouted, but the sheer volume of the fight was too much.

Howl answered anyway. Thirty fucking minutes! Were way beyond the graveworms threat-line now! This is the real thing, the real shit! Shes fighting the Necros for real. This means Central has to respond, right?

Right, Elpida mouthed, not bothering to shout again. Moving her jaw too much made the black tentacles in the back of her neck push against the edges of her wound. Do the others know? Is Pheiri aware?

Radio contact crackled in the back of Elpidas head, like she was talking on a comms headset. Communications routed directly to her neural lace, via the graveworms own nervous system.

Kagamis voice sounded in her ears, loud and clear: Yes we fucking unhh! A beat, a grunt, a huff of breath. We fucking know, Commander! And the quicker this is over, the better!

Rough ride down there? Elpida asked.

Somebody else replied with a long whoop, howling like an animal: Awooooooooo! Awwwooooooo!

Is that Illy? Elpida asked. Ilyusha!

Awooooo-oooo!

Fuckin love that little bitch! Howl laughed inside Elpidas head.

Shut up! Kagami snarled. Shut up all of you! This is already hard enough to co-ordinate! Commader, I am serious. Pheiris shields and engines cannot hold like this forever. Yes, he was designed explicitly to endure a nuclear barrage, but not one that goes on for this fucking long!

Elpida acknowledged. Understood. But this will have an end. The graveworm is on a time limit too

She felt a sudden churn and clench in her gut, a reflection of some backwash of emotion from Vermis herself, from the graveworms mind.

Kaga, she interrupted herself. Tightbeam comms to Hope, request images of

A new kind of comms pinged and popped in the back of Elpidas head, a sensation like fingers slipping in beneath her arms and snatching documents off a table in front of her face.

ye!

Hope?

Hopes reply came in the form of a data-stream, beamed right into Elpidas eyeballs via the graveworms MMI-uplink; Kagamis sharp intake of breath told Elpida that Pheiri had received the same images.

The pictures a steady stream of them showed the broken landscape of the corpse-city from far above, an expanse of grey concrete pounded flat by the storm, encrusted with the glossy black mold that had sprouted so quickly. The graveworm was a vast jagged line of darker grey to one side, like a mountain range. The worm-guards line of destruction cut across the aerial view in a curved slash of molten rock and superheated air, filled by vast clouds of pulverised material. The destruction was so vast, Elpida did not doubt it could be seen from beyond Earth with even the naked eye.

On the opposite side of the graveworm, still a few miles out, Hopes live feed showed a triple-blur of motion.

Three objects, approaching the graveworm so fast that Hope couldnt even get a clear picture.

Centrals response, Elpida said. Kagami, time to arrival?

I dont know! Kagami shrieked over the comms. Youre the one plugged into the worm! You tell me!

But Elpida didnt know.

For a split-second Elpida felt the closest thing she could to panic; her connection with the graveworms nervous system told her nothing, as if that beautiful web of plans had fallen apart while she had been looking away. The graveworm had not yet pulled back her immune system to respond to the imminent arrival of Centrals physical assets, and the Necromancers were still active, still fighting, unbound by their limitations. The moment the graveworm stopped, they would turn all that power upon Pheiri, and he would be alone and unprotected. Had something gone wrong?

Vermis

A single hand touched the back of Elpidas neck. Clammy with sweat, but warm and known.

A rasping whisper crept into her brain.

I must catch Central unaware, you see? whispered the worm. I must have its undivided attention, if only for a moment. The Necromancers, they have been pushed to their absolute limit, overwhelming the network pattern buffer with their collective load, by forcing them to re-extrude their bodies over and over again. But that is not quite enough. I must cause a moment of utter disruption, so they will not be able to clear that pattern buffer. So no, hope and daughter of hope, I have not told you the whole plan. And here, hark. That moment comes.

Elpida twisted her head, saw it happen with her own eyes, as well as through the distant camera-feed from Hope.

The sky above the graveworms main body boiled with Centrals response. Three shapes like fluted darts, golden-bronze and crackling with power like living electric storms, each one the length of a skyscraper. They arrived as if slowing instantly from unimaginable speed, cutting the atmosphere with waves of booming pressure, rolling back the edges of the worm-guards wave of destruction.

Vast pillars of blue-yellow electricity arced out from the trio of bronze darts, forming impossibly complex patterns in the air, directly above the mountain-range of the graveworms body. Each new pattern hurt Elpidas eyes, as if the information itself was dangerous; Hope was forced to block out the sight, her images filling with glitches and visual interference.

The dark grey surface of the graveworms distant body began to redden beneath that electric light, as if plunged into forge-fire.

This wasnt the plan! Elpida roared. Vermis! You cant sacrifice this body, you cant leave all those zombies unprotected, you said

Who said a single word about sacrifice?

The graveworm reared up.

A mountain range rose from the earth, foothills of concrete debris and great lakes of water spilling from its sides in torrents like the parting of continents. The ground shook so hard that Elpida felt it even through the body of the worm-guard on which she rode, an earthquake in the roots of the world. A wave of air pressure rolled back the great clouds of dust from the worm-guards battle, buffeting Centrals war-machines where they hung in the air.

The graveworm rose up and up and up, coiling back on itself like its ancient namesake. It dwarfed Elpidas memories of Telokopolis, dwarfed anything crafted by human hands.

An end came into view, towering over the landscape, a living god of metal.

The graveworms head was a vast circular maw of grey metal, ringed by an infinity of inward-pointing spikes, hundreds of meters across. In the centre of that titanic mouth burned a forge hotter than any other, searing Elpidas vision, cooking the air in front of the worm, breaking down the atomic substructure of reality itself a single point of nanomachine blue.

Vermis turned her head toward the physical assets.

And lunged.

Share