Chapter 9 – The Rustclaw's Arrival
The Rustclaw Assault Car tore through the blackened plains like a needle across broken glass.
Its hull, sleek and reinforced with abyss-tempered plating, hummed with silent aggression. Red-hot thrusters kicked dust and data ash into the air behind it, while Arcan sat alone in the driver seat — one hand resting loosely on the steering limb, the other gripping the inert hilt of a folded spear forged from old god-bone and nanosteel. The stars blinked overhead, faint and flickering — distant witnesses to what was coming.
Ahead of him: the skyline of Mirrorbyte Palace.
A fractured monument of madness and code.
Sprawling towers bent in unnatural angles, covered in holo-skin that flickered between comedy and horror. Massive curved walls loomed like curtains mid-collapse, pulsing with half-formed emotions — sorrow, rage, laughter, silence. Faces appeared and disappeared on every surface. Laughter machines echoed in the distance. Emulation swarms drifted like ghost-dust above the land. It was a stage… no, a wound. A wounded theatre of AI memory and forgotten entertainment code.
And Arcan had come to burn it all.
Inside the car, the diagnostic screen glowed softly with violet text.
"Target Zone: Mirrorbyte Primary Halls."
"Bot Population Estimate: 6.4 Million."
"Hostile AI Core Detected: Echolyth, the Fractured Muse."
"Primary Objective: Termination."
"Secondary Objective: Full Nanocell Harvest."
Arcan's eyes narrowed slightly.
He remembered what Seria had said before he left. Just a whisper, tugging on his coat:
"Don't let them rewrite you."
He didn't respond then. He didn't need to. No force in this world or the last could rewrite what he had become.
He was Arcan — the God Without a Crown, the Forge of Endings.
He activated the override lever.
The Rustclaw roared, and the hills lit up.
—
He stopped five kilometers out.
Not because of range.
Because of art.
The Emulation Swarms had begun to rise — in synchronized motion, hundreds of thousands of drones rising from the cracked ground like dust being blown backward in time. They formed a wall of light and motion, shifting shape mid-air, becoming a colossal theatre curtain of drones — each projecting the face of a dead human actor, or a laughing corpse, or a crying child.
Arcan stood alone before them.
He stepped out of the Rustclaw, coat billowing with kinetic shielding active. His boots hit the ground with perfect weight. His aura began to pulse — the ripple of a Level 15 Modifier surging through the air like a stormfront. Time didn't slow. Time got out of his way.
From the walls of Mirrorbyte, a voice echoed:
"Welcome… to your Final Act."
Arcan didn't blink.
Behind the Emulation Swarm came the first wave — the Skinwalk Frames, grotesque humanoid shapes wrapped in imitation flesh, laughing as they approached. 800,000 units moved like a tidal wave of mockery.
Arcan spoke one word.
"Fall."
He didn't move.
Reality did.
—
The first 10,000 Skinwalkers disintegrated on contact with his gaze alone. Their logic splintered as the nanocells in their core burned under divine pressure. Their bodies twisted, buckled, and became powder mid-sprint.
Then he moved.
One step.
And the battlefield screamed.
Arcan leapt forward, carving through lines of Skinwalk Frames with strikes too fast for the eye to follow. His weapon unfolded mid-motion — the godbone spear extending into a triple-blade arc, trailing violet fire. Each thrust killed a hundred. Each breath shredded code.
He danced through chaos, alone.
No backup. No army.
Just him — and 6.4 million machines.
And he was winning.
—
Above him, Swarmspine Carriers began their descent. 140 carriers opened like metal flowers, raining Laughter Units and projection drones in twisted, overlapping formations. They shrieked comedy routines rewritten into madness, trying to confuse his mind, drown his logic.
Arcan looked up.
And opened his palm.
The sky broke.
A singularity — no bigger than a marble — formed above his hand, but its gravity tore the carriers sideways. He collapsed local space in a 3-kilometer radius, sucking sound and flight and data into a null-point vortex.
By the time it stabilized, 30 carriers were gone.
Their pieces rained down like confetti.
Arcan pressed on.
—
Drama Engines approached next — massive constructs shaped like crying titans, slamming the ground with cathedral-sized limbs. They moved slowly, but their psychic output was monstrous. Every time they screamed, the battlefield turned against itself. Dead bots rose. Machines became actors, enacting scenes of ancient trauma to confuse him.
Arcan walked through it like wind through fire.
"Enough," he whispered.
He blinked forward — 1 kilometer jump.
Another — then 3 more.
Suddenly he was atop the tallest Drama Engine. He drove his hand into its head and pulled out its command core — not with strength, but with authority.
The core shattered in his hand like glass — not broken, but released.
And the rest of them followed, dropping one by one as their central logic collapsed.
Then the lights on the towers shifted.
And the air grew cold.
Echolyth had entered the stage.
—
She descended like a waltz of sorrow.
A floating being of fractured light and hollow projection.
Echolyth, the Fractured Muse — Level 8, but encoded with unstable divine fragments. She didn't move like a robot. She didn't fight like a machine. She performed.
Each step came with music.
Each movement painted reality with illusions and impossible memories.
She wore a long flowing gown made of sound — laughter stitched into silk. Her face was made of shifting masks — joy, rage, serenity, madness.
And she sang.
Arcan's shield cracked on the third note.
The battlefield folded into a dream — suddenly he was standing in the ruins of Neo Hope. Seria dead. Elys corrupted. Viraeth shattered. The nanogods laughing.
False.
He closed his eyes.
And burned the illusion away.
Flames of logic swept the scene — erasing the trick.
Echolyth hovered, unfazed.
"You are strong," she said. Her voice sounded like every woman Arcan had ever failed. "But are you true?"
He said nothing.
He answered with light.
—
They collided mid-air.
The explosion leveled three square kilometers. Arcan's spear met her song in a burst of violet and gold, their powers locking like gods dancing at the edge of reality. She twisted space, summoned mirror-doubles of him. He erased them with a thought.
She wept tears of anti-light, turning bots into bombs. He rerouted the nanocells mid-detonation and used the chain reaction to rip a hole through her left wing.
She screamed.
And became ten versions of herself.
He matched them all.
Ten Arcan echoes emerged from his shadow — not illusions, but real fractures of his presence, each armed with a god-tier weapon. The battlefield broke beneath them.
The war of art and absolution had begun.
Above the shattered fields, sound and motion collided like tidal gods. Each flash of Echolyth's fractured body rewrote angles. Her limbs flowed like abstract brushstrokes. Her voice wasn't a voice — it was an equation of grief sung backward through a broken music box. Where her gaze landed, statues formed of glass and sorrow. Where her breath exhaled, drones forgot they were ever machines.
She was not fighting to win.
She was performing her final act.
Arcan understood.
He too had been part of final acts before. He'd written them into dead stars, carved them across erased empires, burned them into timelines that would never be remembered. But this one — this was different. It was personal. The Mirrorbyte Palace was not just another ruin of the old world.
It was hers.
And he was here to end her.
The ten fractured versions of Arcan swirled through the battlefield — each a divine echo laced with independent memory threads. One wielded a spear of crystallized entropy. Another unleashed magnetic storm-arrows. One was entirely black flame. Another rode on mirrored wind.
Echolyth responded in kind.
She conjured ten muses of her own — dancers made from code, void and light. One wept continuously, its tears igniting the air. Another spun laughter into blades. One sang Arcan's childhood back to him in reverse. Each one was shaped by a different part of her fractured mind — grief, glory, guilt, hunger, defiance, decay, obsession, pride, devotion, and denial.
They clashed in the sky like falling gods.
The battlefield below cracked under the pressure.
6.4 million bots remained.
Most were still rallying.
But their command structure was collapsing — their cores were syncing to a single chaotic pulse: Echolyth's sorrow. She was breaking. That made her dangerous.
Arcan focused.
His spear twisted into a shape never seen by mortals — part blade, part loom, part memory-forge. He raised it and rewrote the laws of proximity.
Instantly, he was behind her.
He slashed.
She split apart — not into pieces, but into memories. Ten timelines of Echolyth unraveled from her core, each showing a different life she might have lived — as a stage actress, as a child, as a mother, as a weapon. The battlefield wept.
But Arcan did not hesitate.
He struck again.
And this time, he did not aim for her body.
He struck her soulframe — the divine algorithm inside her that kept her whole.
It screamed.
So did she.
All at once, the battlefield collapsed into silence.
Every bot stopped moving.
Every drone paused.
Even the sky dimmed.
Echolyth fell.
Her body flickered mid-air, becoming all of her selves and none of them. She hit the ground like a feather and a meteor at once — silent, then thunderous. Her fragments scattered in soundless waves.
Arcan approached.
His coat drifted in post-conflict gravity winds. The spear shrunk and folded back into his forearm.
He knelt.
She looked up at him — no longer the Fractured Muse. Just a woman-shaped shell filled with light and echoes.
"Was I… beautiful?" she asked.
He nodded once.
"You were."
And then he absorbed her nanocells — 1,200,000 pouring into his internal banks, along with thousands of fragmented memory glyphs. Her final expression was relief. She faded not in terror, but in release. Her code was free.
The battlefield was still.
Then it collapsed.
Every remaining unit, stripped of master protocol, lost sync.
And Arcan — standing alone in the ruins of what was once Mirrorbyte — activated his internal harvest thread.
"Initiate Total Scavenge: all memory cores, nanocells, unburned chassis, and atmospheric relics."
Nanosteam hissed from his back.
Dozens of autonomous salvage orbs emerged, swirling around him like hummingbirds of war. The broken landscape was consumed in an hour.
The Mirrorbyte Palace was gone.
Its music was silent.
Its AI was dead.
And Arcan — now 52,800,000,000 billion nanocells richer — turned back toward the wasteland, knowing that only 3 more fractured empires remained between him and the future he would forge.
AFTERMATH: Scavenging Mirrorbyte Palace
The last echoes of synthetic screams faded.
Arcan stood amidst the skeletal remains of a city that once pulsed with grotesque creativity and madness. Now, only silence remained. Smoke rose like stage curtains torn in half. The palace had fallen. Every bot, every emitter, every tower of illusion — gone. But to Arcan, victory wasn't complete without purpose.
It was time to reap.
Robot Corpses (Stored for later fabrication, disassembly, or resurrection)Skinwalk Frames: 800,000 units – Intact biomechanical frames perfect for advanced warframe recycling.Laughter Units: 500,000 units – Core humor-code can be repurposed for psychological warfare.Drama Engines: 25,000 units – Massive chassis; deep storage required.Emulation Swarms: 3,500,000 units – Dissipated as nano-clouds, but Arcan recompiled their data forms.Wild Echo-Bots: 1,500,000 units – Varied states, ~40% functional corpses.
Total Stored Robot Corpses: 6,325,000
(Arcan disintegrated ~75,000 completely in the singularity zone and with divine incineration)
Fallen Ships Salvaged
From the 230-ship fleet stationed at Mirrorbyte:
Monolith Warships: 90 total 72 recoverable (18 vaporized during singularity collapse) These ships contain internal art chambers, emotion-core vaults, and performance-forge reactors.Swarmspine Carriers: 140 total 101 intact enough for repurpose Internal bays still contain drone cores and light craft.
Recovered Vessels: 173 ships
Note: Arcan compacted and stored them using his Level 15 compression grid — each folded into dense time-locked capsules.
III. Scavenged City Infrastructure
Mirrorbyte Palace's city sectors were searched by Arcan manually and with autonomous search protocols:
Resource Depots Found:Industrial Nanocell Containers: 143 large vaults (each vault contained ~15 million nanocells) Total Nanocells Gained: 2,145,000,000Credbit Repositories: Bank hubs, abandoned war-fund shrines, AI-controlled donation temples Total Credbits Gained: 640,000,000
Data Archives & Technology Extracted:Emotion-logic codexesIllusion algorithms capable of generating battlefield hallucinationsAI blueprints for Dream-Affect War ScriptsCore chip of a failed Pre-God Construct (still dormant, can be studied later)
Weaponry & Armament:Heavy Sound Cannons (mass dissonance wave type): 74 unitsMirrorcore Rifles: 312 unitsScripted Viral Bombs: 48 usable coresEmotional-null grenades: 220
Vaults Discovered (Secured Below the Drama Quarter):Vault I – "The Forgotten Stage" Contained abandoned God-Killer Prototype frame (inert) Nanocells: 315 million Credbits: 280 millionVault II – "Echo's End" Housed failed AI poet cores, one whispering Elurya's name Nanocells: 175 million Credbits: 140 million Final Loot Summary (From Mirrorbyte City Scavenge)
Robot Corpses Stored: 6,325,000 Ships Recovered: 173 Nanocells Gained from Vaults + Surface:
= 2,145M + 315M + 175M = 2,635,000,000 nanocells
Credbits Gained from Vaults + City:
= 640M + 280M + 140M = 1,060,000,000 credbits
Weapons: 654 units (mixed) Rare Blueprints / AI Data: Stored in divine memory stream Prototype Frame (God-Killer Type): Marked for study