Content Warnings

Dissociation
Loss of self
Body horror

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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. Wasn’t 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 wasn’t 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.

“I’m not you!” she tried to cry out. “I’m not all of you, I’m—”

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, didn’t 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 wasn’t right. Was it? She wasn’t 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. She 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 Luna’s 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 howler’s 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, Howl’s shoulder with the other; two hands, so this wasn’t 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 Elpida’s front so hard it left red welts down her skin.

“You’re not allowed, you’re not allowed to go!” Howl wailed. “You keep doing this! You’re 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. She’s 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. “It’s just me here, Elps. And you can’t ever do that again—”

“It’s alright, Howl. I remember who I am now.” But she shook her head. “We can’t stay here. The fight, the real one, how is it—”

A distant rumble shook the void, a far-away detonation so deep it made Elpida’s 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. “Let’s—”

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.

Elpida’s physical body was right where she’d 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 graveworm’s 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 vast 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 Howl’s 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 graveworm’s 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 graveworm’s 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. Elpida’s guts shook with the backwash of nearby gravitic engines, waves of debris and even explosions themselves shunted left and right by the worm-guard’s internal projectors. Weaponry she couldn’t 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 graveworm’s wordless presence in the back of her mind could not explain those. That technology had come long after the graveworm’s 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 Pheiri’s 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 Pheiri’s 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 didn’t seem to notice. Her jaw hung open.

Elpida couldn’t blame Lykke for staring. She didn’t 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 Elpida’s 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! We’re way beyond the graveworm’s threat-line now! This is the real thing, the real shit! She’s 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 Elpida’s head, like she was talking on a comms headset. Communications routed directly to her neural lace, via the graveworm’s own nervous system.

Kagami’s 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 Elpida’s head.

“Shut up!” Kagami snarled. “Shut up all of you! This is already hard enough to co-ordinate! Commander, I am serious. Pheiri’s 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 graveworm’s mind.

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

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

ye!

“Hope?”

Hope’s reply came in the form of a data-stream, beamed right into Elpida’s eyeballs via the graveworm’s MMI-uplink; Kagami’s 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-guard’s 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, Hope’s live feed showed a triple-blur of motion.

Three objects, approaching the graveworm so fast that Hope couldn’t even get a clear picture.

“Central’s response,” Elpida said. “Kagami, time to arrival?”

“I don’t know!” Kagami shrieked over the comms. “You’re the one plugged into the worm! You tell me!”

But Elpida didn’t know.

For a split-second Elpida felt the closest thing she could to panic; her connection with the graveworm’s 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 Central’s 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 Elpida’s 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 graveworm’s main body boiled with Central’s 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 graveworm’s body. Each new pattern hurt Elpida’s 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 graveworm’s distant body began to redden beneath that electric light, as if plunged into forge-fire.

“This wasn’t the plan!” Elpida roared. “Vermis! You can’t sacrifice this body, you can’t 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 Central’s 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 Elpida’s memories of Telokopolis, dwarfed anything crafted by human hands.

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

The graveworm’s 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 Elpida’s 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.

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Whoever knew that being wired into a trillion-strong gestalt mind might be a little challenging to one’s sense of selfhood, even for a person as strong as Elpida? Well, turns out it is!

Ahem. Anyway! We’re back! Thank you for all your patience; the extra week of no chapter ended up being rather important, and I am feeling (mostly!) all better now. We’re back into the middle-ish of arc 17, and it’s time for some extra-level worm wiggles. Whee!

As for the length of the arc, I’m still planning on keeping it as snappy as I can. We might be going to … 7 chapters??? Maybe? We’ll have to wait and see!

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Thank you for all your support! It’s you who make this all possible.

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you for being here and reading my little story about zombie girls beyond the end of the world. I couldn’t do this without all of you, the readers and audience! Thank you all so much. I have so much more to show you. And I shall see you next chapter. Until then!

There will be no Necroepilogos chapter on the 1st of January, because I’m sick! I’ve made a little patreon post about it here, but it’s not a big deal, I’ll be right as rain again soon. Necroepilogos will return on either the 8th or 15th of January, like usual!

Content Warnings

Cannibalism (yay, it’s back!)
Self-harm

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Vermis’ fingers blurred across the keyboard nestled in her lap, typing too fast for even augmented eyes to follow. Fleeting blue glow chased each keystroke, lighting her emaciated face with the stutter-static of her work.

Strategy blossomed on the screen, bordered by the infinite shadow of the graveworm’s chamber. The frozen world beyond the simulation was overlaid with dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of speculative battle plans, adjusting and changing and morphing a million times a second. The wave of worm-guard was assigned new angles of advance, lines of forward attack, sweeping pincer movements, weapon targeting solutions. The lead worm-guard — the lone forward scout which had plucked Elpida’s physical body from Pheiri’s top hatch, still holding her aloft in a fist of black tentacles — was flooded with reams of specialised commands, flowing past in a gleaming blue river of data. Pheiri was ring-fenced and defined and re-defined and given special carve-outs within the worm-guard’s collective IFF systems and response matrices. Each of the seven Necromancers — Perpetua included — were selected in turn, highlighted and picked out from the background of concrete and black mold, their potential responses and counter-attacks mapped out and predicted, then re-predicted over and over, based on a million possible reactions and counter-reactions and subsequent steps.

Windows spiralled outward from the centre of the screen, multiplying by the thousands. The screen still hung alone in the darkness, casting electric blue glow on the hunched figure of the graveworm’s avatar. But now that screen seemed like a vast wall, stretching away into the shadows.

Elpida tried to follow the plan, but focusing on the screen made her head swim. Illusory infinity was beyond her scale; she was forced to avert her eyes. She stayed quiet and let Vermis work. As the seconds ticked on, she attempted to consult her internal clock, but found only a void where her sense of time should be. All the foresight of Telokopolan genetic engineering had not prepared her for being translated into software.

But still she kept her hand on Vermis’ shoulder. Howl stayed down on the floor, cuddled against the avatar’s side.

Time stretched out. Seconds, minutes, hours, days. Elpida came unmoored, floating in the black.

She blinked. Time snapped back into place. The static whir of mechanical keys halted.

Vermis froze, hands hovering over the keyboard, fingers hesitating as if gripped by one final thought. Her hunched back and bony spine shivered with a slow intake of breath, chased by a wet and difficult swallow.

“That it?” Howl asked. “You done?”

“This … yes,” the avatar murmured. The graveworm’s voice came from everywhere, a whisper from the shadows, fluttering at Elpida’s ears. Her predatory grin deepened. “Yes. This will do it.”

Elpida glanced up at the screen again — a wild cacophony of overlapping information, thousands of exterior views spilling outward, seemingly chaotic at first look, but clearly arranged in a logical and mathematical pattern, far beyond her comprehension. Pheiri, herself, the wave of worm-guard, the seven Necromancers, all were linked together in a gigantic web of action and reaction, prediction and supposition, a network of glowing blue lines, surrounded and bracketed by billion-strong reams of machine-code.

A few unmodified exterior views remained, toward the centre of the screen. They looked ever so slightly different to before. Elpida’s body in the worm-guard’s grip was just an inch more loose and limp. Pheiri’s position had advanced by perhaps a meter or two, the pattern of debris from his tracks completely different. The Necromancers were turned just that tiny bit further in their effort to flee.

“Vermis,” Elpida said. “How much real time has passed?”

The graveworm’s avatar let out a rueful sigh, then hissed as if slurping back drool from between her teeth, bony shoulders adjusting through the thin fabric of her ragged black t-shirt. “About a quarter of a second. I’m rusty, this took far longer than expected. Seven Necromancers? Tch. Hardly the most dire or capable foe I’ve ever faced. Child’s play. Or, should be. An aeon or two ago I could have done this in my sleep. I’m … out of practice.”

“But you’re confident it will work? This is your plan, and it’ll work?”

“It’s all my plans. With this I have covered every eventuality.”

Howl shifted against her flank, one arm around her waist. “You’re doin’ great, wormy. Doin’ it for us.”

Vermis straightened up, uncoiling from over her keyboard, raising one thin and bony hand to sweep her greasy hair out of her face. “No, no I’m not. It’s not enough. It is the best I can do, but I cannot win.”

“Ehh?” Howl said. “What?”

“Explain,” said Elpida.

Vermis tapped a few keys. Windows flashed and flickered past, a dozen shades of blue strobing across her skin. “With my resources and the available time, taking into account the number of targets, the speed of their inevitable retreat, the potential points at which they might decide it is better to turn and fight, the priority defence of your little brother—” overlays of Pheiri zipped past “—and my own considerable atrophy from my peak—”

“Bottom-line it for me,” Elpida said, not unkindly. “Please.”

Vermis sighed again. “At most, I can remove four Necromancers from this fight.”

Howl hissed. “Shit. Shit! What!?”

“Yes.” Vermis hissed , bitter frustration deep in her throat. “This will still leave you three Necromancers to defeat, without my assistance. Three Necromancers. Hnnngh. More than enough to mop up any number of zombies.”

“Four Necromancers,” Elpida echoed. She held onto her emotions; she needed intel. “Before what? Why do you have to stop at four?”

Vermis looked over her shoulder, up at Elpida, cloudy eyes glowing with a flicker of inner blue. “Before Central notices. Once I pass a threshold of involvement, Central will know. I am, of course, Central’s greatest concern, the thing it hates more than anything else, because it was born from me, we were one, once. It is my horrible child. When I deviate from the set lines of our long, cold, frozen war, Central will respond with physical assets.”

“Against us?”

Vermis almost smiled. “Against me.”

“Can you prevail against Central’s physical assets?”

Vermis shrugged. “I have so many bodies. Central cannot exterminate me, just as I cannot slay it. But, losing this particular body would create more problems for you. Would it not?”

Howl spluttered. “The graveworm! You mean the whole graveworm!”

Vermis turned back to the screen. “I have so many worms, I am all the worms, every worm in every grave, gnawing at every scrap of rotten flesh. I am impossible to remove, not without destroying all that is. But if I let Central destroy this one, it will leave you without the protection of my presence. Once Central responds, I must retract the bulk of my immune system to protect this body, or Central will destroy it.”

A deep cold crept into Elpida’s gut; she could see where this was going.

“No graveworm safe zone,” Elpida said. “No basic level of ambient nanos in the air. If you die now, then we’re in the wilds, exposed to revenants from beyond the graveworm safe zone. I’m guessing the corpse of a graveworm would attract some very large scavengers, yes?”

“Mm,” Vermis grunted.

Elpida wet her lips, thinking fast. “How close is your next nearest body? The nearest other graveworm?”

“Seven hundred and sixteen kilometres.”

Howl looked up at Elpida, teeth clenched, eyes wild. “We can make it. In Pheiri. Elps, we can make that! Fuck it, we can do it!”

Elpida shook her head. “The zombies from the tomb can’t.”

“Elps! Three Necromancers! Just one Necro, yeah, shit, maybe we could deal with that, if we got the drop, like with Lykke. But three?! Fuck no! They can just freeze us, or most of us, and then what!? They’ll kill us, they’ll kill Pheiri, they’ll … they … Elps?”

Elpida turned her gaze on Howl and spared her nothing. She felt such instant clarity, such unquestionable steel. Howl trailed off as if she’d seen a nightmare in Elpida’s eyes.

“We promised them the protection of Telokopolis, to the greatest extent we can give it. We’re not betraying that trust.”

“Elps … ”

“Nobody gets left behind, Howl. Nobody gets abandoned. Never. You know that.”

“We can’t fight and win against three fucking Necros! You wanna lose most of the crew, you want that?! You and I, maybe we live, maybe the robots, maybe Shilu, fuck knows, but most of the others are gonna get frozen and killed!”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Elps—”

“You said it yourself,” Elpida interrupted. “Our purpose is to surpass the mistakes of our mother.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Nobody gets abandoned. Especially now.” Elpida felt a strange tremor in her chest. “Whatever the price.”

“You’d rather die?!” Howl spat.

Elpida couldn’t answer. Howl turned her eyes away, jaw clenched tight, teeth creaking.

“So,” Elpida said. “Vermis has to protect this body too. But we can even the fight, take down four Necromancers first. Does that mean permanently? Vermis, you can kill those Necromancers? Not just send them back to the network?”

“Mmhmm,” Vermis grunted. “Necromancers are beyond death, as are we all. But I can suppress them, perform wide-area interdiction on their network signals, force them to reroute through the network. They’ll take weeks to cycle back. But four is my maximum.”

Howl hissed through her teeth. “They’re just Necromancers! You’ve got thousands of worm-guard! Fuck!”

Vermis sighed. She gestured at the screen, tapped a key, sent more reams of data flashing past. “Right now they’re calibrated to cause as little systematic disruption as possible. Central likes the great experiment to run with minimal interference. But that will change when I engage them openly, as soon as I do more than simply let my immune system function as it should. Their permissions will allow them to respond in kind.”

“Can’t you just … I dunno, shelter us with the worm-guard?” Howl asked. “Shit, you’ve got an army of them!”

Vermis shook her head, eyes turning sad as she gazed at the screen, at the billion possibilities sketched out in data and image and overlay, faint blue glow glossy on her unhealthy skin.

“Worm-guard cannot be directly controlled,” she said. “Not by me. They are my immune system, not my hands. I can give them suggestions, but that’s all. Changing that would take me subjective aeons, and we don’t have the time. Pheiri has been marked, Pheiri will be safe, but only for a while. I would be unable to hold them back forever. He must flee, as the Necromancers will, and I will eliminate as many as I can before the threshold of Central’s direct attention. And that will be four.”

Elpida stared at the screen, comprehending nothing she saw, her mind taking the problem apart step by step. Three Necromancers was a better fight than seven, but even just one Necromancer was more than enough to overwhelm any number of zombies. With Lykke on her side, one-on-one might be an even chance, but three-on-one still left two Necromancers for her and Pheiri and the others to deal with. And if the graveworm’s involvement did somehow unshackle the Necromancers, the odds were even worse.

Howl stared at the screens too, teeth clenched, brow furrowed with a look Elpida never wanted to see on her face again. The border of defeat.

“Against three,” Elpida said. “With Lykke on our side. And Shilu. We could … ”

“We’re dead whatever we do,” Howl hissed. “No way out.”

Elpida fought the spectre of defeat; she had been fighting it since the revelation about Telokopolis had planted a seed of doubt in her heart. If Telokopolis had once betrayed the remnants of humanity, were she and her sisters destined to do the same? Were they cut from the same cloth, set on the same inevitable path? Howl said no, that they were made to surpass their mother’s mistakes. Elpida wanted to believe that.

But if they couldn’t even prevail here, what was the point? What if the only option was to sacrifice all the zombies they had protected in the tomb? Wasn’t that the same brutal calculation Telokopolis had made?

Elpida refused.

She took her hand off the avatar’s shoulder and clenched her left fist as hard as she could. She wasn’t quite herself in here, running on the graveworm’s hardware. Clock speed too fast, thoughts too many, too easy to second-guess herself. She should never allow these doubts to weigh her down.

“There’s always a way out,” she said. “Always a way through. And if there isn’t, I’ll make one. Vermis. Graveworm. This isn’t enough. I can tell it isn’t enough. You’re holding something back.”

Vermis froze. “I … I didn’t mean … I’m not trying to—”

Elpida smiled. “Classic trick. When you have to give command advice on an impossible decision, present a flawed plan. The bitch in charge will push it further herself. Then, the horror she decides on is all her fault, her idea all along. Am I correct?”

Vermis swallowed. “I … ”

Howl’s gaze whipped round. “Don’t fucking hold back on us, hey! Anything, anything! Come on!”

Vermis — the graveworm’s secret avatar, greasy and ragged, locked in her own darkness for countless aeons — chewed on her bottom lip. “I did not intend to mislead. I only … ”

“I’m not angry,” said Elpida. “Whatever we do next, the responsibility is mine, not yours.”

Vermis hunched again, closing herself off. “I was hoping you would notice, but … but it will require trust beyond anything I deserve to be granted. I cannot just ask you to do this.”

“Hey! Hey!” Howl shook her by the shoulder. “I thought you wised up already, for fuck’s sake!”

But Elpida felt the gravity in those words, in the way the graveworm’s omnidirectional voice dropped to a low hiss of shame.

“Howl, hold up.” Elpida stepped around to Vermis’ side, opposite Howl. She dropped into a squat, trying to catch the graveworm’s cloudy eyes. “Vermis—”

“I am but a worm,” she muttered, speaking to her own lap. “I am not worthy of this.”

“Vermis. You were our mother’s lover, you were … humanity, for whatever that word means anymore. If we can’t trust you, who can we trust?”

“Your mother,” Vermis whispered. “Not I.”

“And right now, she needs you. Telokopolis needs you.”

Vermis refused to raise her face. “I am not deserving of such trust. I, who bore such hatred, who bore it into this world, I’ve betrayed all of you. Her, her children, even the teeming masses of undead, I have betrayed them all before I even knew there was such to betray. How can you trust me with anything? I cannot ask—”

Elpida reached out and took the graveworm’s chin, skin greasy and cold beneath Elpida’s fingers. She forced the avatar to look up, into Elpida’s eyes. Cloudy purple blinked back behind a veil of tears.

“You are forgiven,” Elpida said. “I am the first-born daughter of Telokopolis, and I forgive you. I will forgive and accept anybody, any degree of crime, any betrayal, it doesn’t matter, as long as you’re on our side now and intend to stay. As long as you’re fighting for Telokopolis now, as long as you mean it. Do you mean it, graveworm? Do you fight for Telokopolis now?”

Vermis tried to nod, tears thickening in her eyes.

“Then you’re one of us. I forgive you.” Elpida leaned forward and kissed Vermis on the forehead, then eased back and smiled wider. “And now you’re forgiven, you’re going to accept my trust, and give me everything you can possibly do. No limits. That’s what I want. Understand?”

Vermis blinked several times, swallowed hard. “It will be dangerous, for both you and Howl.”

“I don’t care,” Elpida said.

“Yeah!” Howl snapped. “Fuck danger! We’re the danger!”

Vermis nodded. Elpida let go of her chin.

“To her daughters, I pass the weapons I cannot wield,” Vermis muttered. She sniffed loudly and wiped her eyes, then turned to Howl. “You will need network permissions, higher than the stolen scrap your mother slipped to you while you were in her care. My permissions, or at least a sliver of them, enough to help you resist Necromancer control.” Vermis chewed on her bottom lip. “This will violate both of us. There is no way around it, not on the time-scale we require.”

Howl glanced at Elpida. Elpida nodded. Howl looked back at Vermis.

“Sure thing, wormy. Hit me hard as you need.”

“And … ” Vermis sighed. “This will make you a priority target for Central. There won’t be any going back.”

Howl cracked a grin. “Fuck it, we’re already all-in. Paint me up good.”

Vermis paused — then bit down hard, somewhere inside her own mouth, with the unmistakable sound of teeth tearing flesh. Her eyes scrunched shut and she let out a low wail of strangled pain. A thin trickle of blood and saliva slipped from between her lips, a string of mucus drooping toward her lap.

Then she leaned forward, slowly and cautiously, asking permission with her body. Howl’s eyes widened in surprise, but she did not back away from the kiss.

Vermis kissed a mouthful of blood and a gobbet of meat past Howl’s lips.

The kiss was over in a handful of seconds. Vermis sat back, wheezing with pain, clutching her cheek, drooling bloody saliva. Howl’s mouth was smeared with crimson, pupils blown wide, face turning pale and waxen.

“Swallow it,” Vermis croaked. “You have to swallow it.”

Howl nodded, visibly sweating. Her throat bobbed — but then she retched, heaving forward, eyes bulging. Vermis whipped a hand out with sudden speed and clamped it over Howl’s mouth.

“Keep it down,” the graveworm hissed through bloody teeth. “Reject it now and this will not work. You can do this. You are her daughter. You can make it part of you.”

Howl swallowed again, harder this time, throat bobbing. She started to shake and shiver, as if in the grip of a sudden and terrible fever. Strange muffled moans leaked from around Vermis’ fingers. Elpida struggled against an urge to shove Vermis aside and rip Howl away. The instinct to protect her sister was overwhelming. She’d never seen Howl suffer in this way, nor any of the cadre. The pilot phenotype was immune or resistant to so many common diseases and maladies. To see Howl gripped by strange sickness was a horror she’d never faced before.

But this was a simulation, a software space inside the graveworm’s mind. Howl was not sick, she was accepting part of the graveworm itself.

Eventually Howl’s shaking subsided. Elpida let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. Vermis slowly removed her hand, leaving a blood print smeared across Howl’s lips.

“Howl? Howl?” Elpida said. “Can you hear me?”

Howl couldn’t focus her eyes. Swaying on the spot, unable to sit upright, she lurched one way, then the other, then tumbled forward. Elpida pushed past Vermis and caught Howl under the armpits. Howl’s eyes rolled, passing across Elpida’s face as if she wasn’t there, peering into the shadowy depths of the infinite chamber beyond.

“Uhhnn … ” Howl groaned. “God-meat, huh? Shiiiiit.”

“Howl, can you hear me? Howl! Respond!”

“Loud and clear, Elps. Commander. Commander of my … cunt.”

“How do you feel?”

Howl turned in Elpida’s arms, limp and boneless, as if trying to burrow into her lap. “Like I’ve just mainlined a bucket of morphine.”

Vermis cleared her throat, still clutching the wound inside her cheek, bloody drool soaking into the front of her filthy black t-shirt. “I’ve passed her as much of my own permission code as she can take without losing herself. She won’t have access to it all, not right away, but overcoming Necromancer nanomachine-stop instructions shouldn’t take too long to figure out.”

“They can’t freeze us anymore?” Elpida asked. “She could always do that with my own body.”

Vermis shook her head, pointed at Howl. “That wasn’t permissions, that was just her own network presence running inside you. With this, she’ll have access to some of the same wide-effect permissions as a Necromancer.”

Elpida nodded. “Thank you. I’m glad we trusted you.”

Vermis smiled, bloody and grim, blinking slowly, pale lids sliding over cloudy eyes like a film over milk. “We’re not done yet. Your turn.”

Elpida straightened up, as best she could with Howl limp in her lap. “Whatever you need.”

Vermis took a deep breath, then spoke through the thick blood pooling in her mouth. “There is a way to relinquish control of a small portion of my worm-guard, when Central responds and I am forced to pull back my immune system.”

Elpida nodded. “Howl did it before. Hijacked a few worm-guard for a few minutes.”

Vermis shook her head. “No. My immune system has learned that trick. And you will need more than a few minutes. I can gift you partial control, but I need a body. A zombie body. Yours is right there.”

“My physical body?”

“Revenants are the one thing Central cannot control. It can kill you, send Necromancers to freeze you and melt you, force you back into the cycle of resurrection. It can wear down your minds, it can eat you from the inside, force you to betray every principle and scrap of trust and faith you ever had. But it cannot take your free will to refuse. So I need a zombie’s body. I need to be inside your head, at least for a time, and with that access I will wire you to my worm-guard. Not many, perhaps only a handful. But they will be yours, and that may be enough to finish three Necromancers.”

“Risks?”

Vermis smiled, heavy with melancholy. “I have never done this before. You may be crushed by the weight of me. You may lose yourself. You may be overwhelmed by the feedback from half a dozen worm-guard. I simply have no idea. But … ” Gently, Vermis reached for Elpida, one bony hand slipping behind Elpida’s head. Elpida let her touch, cold fingers exploring the back of Elpida’s neck, tangling in her hair. “You were one of her pilots, weren’t you? You know what it’s like, to join with a machine, mind-to-mind.” Vermis tapped the place where Elpida’s skull met Elpida’s spine. “You had a mind-machine interface socket, right here, yes? When you were warm and quick?”

Elpida felt a shiver of longing. “It’ll be similar to piloting a combat frame?”

“A little. You may survive the experience, where other zombies would be blotted out. I don’t think it’ll be pleasant.”

Elpida nodded. “I’m prepared. Between Howl with network permissions, and a worm-guard of our own, we might have a fighting chance.”

Vermis’s smile died away. “I would give her daughters that fighting chance. I would give myself, if I could, if it would make any difference.”

“This will make a difference.” Elpida grinned. “How do we do this? Do you need to kiss me too?”

Vermis shook her head. “No, this will be … well.” She lifted the keyboard from her lap. “Put Howl in my lap, let’s get into position.”

Elpida rolled Howl into Vermis’ lap. Howl, dazed and groggy, blood-drunk with network permissions, allowed herself to be propped upright, head against the avatar’s shoulder, her backside nestled in Vermis’ lap. Vermis closed her arms around Howl’s front, keyboard propped on Howl’s knees.

“Wheeeeee,” Howl muttered. “Time to ride.”

Vermis seemed overwhelmed for a moment, blinking rapidly, tears shining in her eyes. She sniffed hard. “Now … now you, Elpida,” she said. “I should sit in your lap in turn, that would be easiest. We have to be one, three minds in one body. Mine is the biggest, I need both of you to brace me. And I … I apologise, I know I am … rotten and vile, I have been in the dark for so long, I must be disgusting. I am—”

“Hey,” said Elpida, as gently as she could. “Nothing to be ashamed of. You’re with us now.”

Elpida got behind Vermis, sat down on the floor, and dragged the graveworm into her lap. The shadows rose up either side to support her back, a strange void-like cushion of nothingness taking Elpida’s weight. Vermis weighed so little, all skin and bone, fragile beneath Elpida’s left hand. Howl snorted, snuggling deeper. Vermis was tiny in Elpida’s lap, engulfed by Elpida’s muscles, her left arm around Vermis’s waist, hand on Howl’s belly.

“So warm … ” Vermis muttered.

A wave of cold passed up Elpida’s spine, crawling toward her neck. She stiffened in surprise. “Is that you?”

“Relax,” said Vermis. “It will feel strange. Give me your stump.”

Elpida began to shiver with cold, sudden and sharp, seeping outward from her spine, soaking into the meat of her organs, paralysing the space behind her eyes. But she raised the stump of her right arm.

“What is this— this cold— it’s—”

Vermis took Elpida’s stump in her right hand. Instantly the cold flooded her wound-site, dense and deep.

“I am wiring you into my nervous system,” said Vermis. “Hold onto yourself, as best you can. If you cannot, if the worst comes to the worst, then I will prioritise the lives of your comrades.”

Elpida grinned through the cold. “I’d have it no other way. I’m glad you and I understand each other.”

“Are you ready?”

“Telokopolis is forever,” Elpida said. She was calm, her mind prepared, her body coiled like a spring, freezing on the inside. “Do it.”

“I … yes.” She heard a smile in the graveworm’s voice. “Telokopolis. Hope. Forever.”

01110100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01111001
01110100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01111001
01110100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01111001

01110111 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01110101 01110000 00101100 00100000 01100101 01101100 01110000 01110011 00100001

Elpida’s eyes flew open, raw and red, stinging with the whip of roaring wind.

She was upright, on her own two feet, standing on a surface of smooth transparent diamond, beneath which pulsed and throbbed great masses of tarry-black muscle and mucus.

Her gut reacted instantly — Silico!

But her vision was blurred by static toward the edges, as if some part of her mind struggled to push back visual interference. And then she realised; not Silico at all.

She was standing on the back of a worm-guard.

Ropes of black muscle and sticky fibres anchored her by both arms, like the reins of a riding animal. Her left arm was wrapped with the stuff, a knotty mass of it held in her fist. The stump of her right arm was entirely swallowed up within the living material. She felt it burrowing into her flesh, flowing backward into her veins, a creeping wave of black spider-webbing up her nerves.

“Vermis!” she yelled. “Vermis, what—”

Chill! Howl shouted inside Elpida’s head. Chill out, Elps! Mum’s old side-piece has got us covered!

Elpida trusted Howl, but the sensation was like a wave of ice freezing her arm, creeping toward her chest and her heart. Worse than that, another clutch of tendrils were worming their way up the back of her neck, sticky and cold, feeling for an MMI cranial uplink slot that she no longer possessed.

Elpida raised her eyes. The shattered post-storm landscape whirled around her, a ruin of concrete and black mold to the far horizon. To her left and her right, waves of worm-guard swept forward, pounding toward the Necromancers still skidding to a halt, turning on their heels, to escape the graveworm’s response.

Pheiri was below her, the off-white of his nano-composite bone-armour flashing past as he tried to turn.

An alien impulse jerked the stump of Elpida’s right arm. The worm-guard on which she stood reared back, letting Pheiri go. An iridescent mass flew past, descending toward Pheiri.

Iriko! And on her back, swept along in her wave, a slash of white and blonde — Lykke?

Elpida grinned, she couldn’t help it; she realised exactly what Iriko had been trying to do, saving Pheiri from the nasty worm-guard. Howl grinned with her, a wild cackle between her teeth.

Something else grinned too, something that hadn’t felt wind on skin or the taste of air for a very long time.

“Hey blobbo!” Howl roared at the top of Elpida’s lungs. “Get on board, girlie! We’re gonna rip open some Necromancer!”

Iriko twisted past, a piece of oil-soaked foil caught in a gale, Lykke clinging on as hard as she could. Pheiri gunned his engines and skidded across the broken concrete at the exact angle to catch Iriko at the end of her descent; she landed hard, splattering across his outer deck. But she was mostly intact, already pulling her biomass back together. Lykke staggered free, gaping up at Elpida on the worm-guard’s back.

Elpida didn’t have time to shout again.

Those little tendrils at her neck decided they would make their own MMI uplink slot. With a sharp pain and a hot gush of salt-red blood, they slit the back of Elpida’s head open, right where spine meets skull.

She felt them wriggle inside, invading her cranial cavity; her vision went red, then black, then whited-out with pain. She screamed, or bit down on a scream, she couldn’t tell. Somebody held both her hands. Somebody else held her from behind. Somebody was in her lap. Howl’s voice whispering in her ear.

And then, infinity.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Welcome to worm-brain, Elpida. Try to keep your head above the surface.

Well, here we are, getting stuck into the meat and bone of arc 17! Things are still predicted to be quite short and snappy this time. 5-6 chapters, perhaps? I think I already mentioned this. Behind the scenes, of course, I’ve already lost control of my zombie girls, as I always do. So we’ll have to see where they take things.

Meanwhile, more art! I can’t link this one directly, because of how wordpress functions; instead, click over to the fanart page, and scroll all the way to the end. You’ll find an animation (by samsungsmartfrog!) of Pheiri and the graveworm, being surprised(?!) by a regenerating Necromancer. Amazing to see experiments in animating the vibes of Necroepilgoos, thank you so much!

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!

And thank you, dear readers! I know, I know, I say this every week, but I mean it no less for the repetition. Necroepilogos would not exist without all of you, the audience! Without anybody to watch this wriggling worm, it would simply slip back into the soil. So, thank you for being here. I’ll seeya next chapter! Until-

Oh! But you know what? I’m posting this a few second past midnight on December 25th. So, Merry Christmas! Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, whatever you’re up to right now, I do hope you have a very lovely day indeed. And I’ll seeya next chapter! Until then!

Content Warnings

Suicidal ideation
Suicide attempt (kind of, sort of, not really, but I’m erring on the side of caution for this)
Sexually derogatory language

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Iriko was a fool. Neglectful! Delinquent! Fool, fool, fool!

Pheiri was in trouble. Pheiri was going to get hurt — no, Pheiri had already been hurt. Only a small wound so far, a few fistfuls gouged out of his beautiful white armour. But even a single scratch on Pheiri was too much for Iriko to bear, when it was all her fault. She could have stopped it, she should have been there. If only she had stayed by Pheiri’s side, she would have melted those Necromancers into sludge before a single one of them could touch him with their filthy claws.

But Iriko had wandered too far. She cursed herself for a fool.

Earlier, as they had been leaving the tomb together, Pheiri had tried his best to get Iriko to hang back, to stay behind, alongside the column of trudging zombies who didn’t dare venture out until the storm was gone. Iriko hadn’t liked that very much; she knew Pheiri was only worried for her safety, but she wasn’t about to let him go speeding off into the unknown all by himself, no matter how many trusty zombies he had stowed away inside his body. Iriko told herself she would follow him wherever he went. Whatever happened next, Pheiri would not be by himself.

But then she had slid out of the tomb, back beneath the roiling black skies, still whipped by storm-winds, yet no longer pounded by hailstones and concrete debris. Temptation sang in every cell, a yearning Iriko barely understood, a call to spread herself out once again, to catch the wind and—

Fly!

Iriko had taken a running leap from the edge of the tomb’s outer walls. Before she knew what she was doing, she had taken to the skies again, riding the last of the storm up, up, up, into the freedom of the open air.

She made herself into a flexible membrane, a sail to cross an ocean in the sky. Her heart sang with a million smiles, her mind buzzing with a sensation she couldn’t remember ever having felt before. How could she resist this feeling? The sheer rush of rising over the concrete and steel, the absolute freedom of movement, liberated from the ground, the perfect angles as she cut and dived and swam on the updrafts, surfing each gale-gust, shaping her body into a funnel or a scoop or a razor-edged dart, zipping and zooming, swooping and soaring.

Iriko had spent lifetimes skulking in holes and nosing through the dirt. Now she had a taste of the sky, and she couldn’t get enough.

When the storm finally died away and the winds could no longer support her weight, Iriko accepted her return to the earth with a grudging pout. Did all good things have to end, truly? She sent messages of frustration to Pheiri, capping her feelings with an experimental poem.

「to soar is divine
gravity the worst tyrant
freedom so fleeting」

She assumed Pheiri would be too busy minding his zombies to make a proper reply. Elpida and Howl and Kagami and Serin had all explained the plan to her; Iriko knew that eventually some nasty Necromancers might appear. But that was okay, because Pheiri was going to be gallant and genius and blow them all up.

To Iriko’s surprise, Pheiri not only found a moment to acknowledge her poem with a receipt ping — to which Iriko replied with another ping, and kept doing so until Pheiri stopped the chain — but he also passed her a fresh mass of data down the tightbeam uplink. It was a new set of geometric puzzles and mathematical problems for Iriko to chew on with her mind. At first she thought he was just trying to distract her, so she replied with a fresh pout. But when she began to play around with the puzzles, she discovered that they unfolded into the most beautiful structures — multi-stage wings and balance equations and aerodynamic calculations.

Pheiri was trying to satisfy her desire for flight, though it was so difficult for her body, without the aid of the wind. Iriko could have squealed in delight.

She kept pace with Pheiri as he pushed deeper into the changed landscape of crushed concrete and twisted steel, as it began to blossom with mats and stalks of glistening black mould. He had told her to keep her distance, but she didn’t take that too seriously.

His warnings were not why she had wandered. No, it was the empty desolation that had drawn her away from him.

For the first time in longer than Iriko could remember, she was truly alone.

Except for Pheiri, of course, but that was okay. And his zombies, but they were tucked away inside Pheiri, where she couldn’t see them right then. And yes, more zombies were pouring out of the tomb, now far to their rear, but they were so far away they couldn’t hope to catch up for a long time. And, yes, fine, there was the graveworm up ahead, towering over the landscape, but who cared about that? Hope was somewhere distant, up in the sky, always watching, but Iriko tried not to think about Hope.

No zombies, no monsters from beyond the graveworm line, nothing but her and Pheiri. Alone together in a landscape of pulverised concrete, rapidly sprouting with more nanomachine mould than Iriko could ever hope to eat, not all by herself.

Iriko was so used to hiding, staying tight to the shadows, squeezing through the guts of ruined buildings, armouring herself close and secure, making herself as invisible as possible. But this new landscape was empty, with wide flat vistas of crushed concrete in every direction, and not a zombie in sight.

For the first time ever, Iriko was free to lounge in the open and wander without caution.

She had gorged herself on the thick stalks and plush mats of spreading black mould, following her gut and her nose wherever they led. She had dived through the pools and streams of storm-water, her body flowing around tangles of twisted steel, ejecting crumbs of concrete accidentally ingested, smashing and splashing and skimming through the murky rubble.

She was having such fun, eating all the while. She didn’t worry too much about Pheiri’s warnings to keep her distance, for her own safety. Silly boy always worried so much!

But then the Necromancers had sprouted like evil mushrooms.

They had chased Pheiri, lunged at him, landed on him. One of them, a flying thing like a bundle of knives, had torn chunks from his hide.

Flying! Like Iriko wanted! Using that gift to hurt Pheiri! Her Pheiri!

The moment she saw it happen — too far away, too far to help — Iriko went cold all over and vomited up the black goop she’d been chewing. She didn’t want to eat any more. She felt sick. She was a bad friend, a bad ally, a bad—

Bad girl?

Iriko felt like such a fool. If she’d had eyes right then, she would have manufactured tear ducts just to weep. If she’d had a mouth and lungs, she would have screamed. If she’d had a heart, it would have stopped.

But she didn’t. Those would be wastes of time, biomass, and nanomachines.

Pheiri needed her help, not her hysterics.

Iriko exploded from within the pool of black gunk on which she’d been grazing, hurling herself up the bank of shattered concrete and into the open air. She abandoned the vestiges of her stealthy habits, shedding the mirror-finish on her refractive mail, slicking her surfaces down smooth, folding away her more sensitive sensory organs, optimising her body for speed and power, adding muscle to her underside and a spike-ram of rock-hard bone to her front. If only the storm was still blowing, she could have taken to the air and been at Pheiri’s side in seconds! The best she could do now was streamline her body and turn her front into a battering ram, to slam the world aside as she powered through the broken landscape.

She leapt from a high point of ragged concrete, dived through tangles of broken building, smashed aside shivering copses of black mould-trees. She turned her body into a linear machine on a straight-line course back to Pheiri’s side, throwing up a torrent of debris in her wake.

But she was so far from Pheiri, it would take minutes to reach him like this.

Pheiri blared at her down the tightbeam.

「NEGATIVE escort remove DANGER CLOSE」

「no no!」 Iriko spat back. 「shut up shut up shut up! stupid pheiri stupid stupid!」

「NEGATIVE NEGATIVE escort remove convoy procedure compromised DANGER CLOSE」

「pbbbbbbttttttttt!」

She spat denial pings at him; Pheiri took them all and repeated his message. Why wouldn’t he accept her help!?

Iriko watched the dirty little fight unfold up on Pheiri’s outer deck, his zombies struggling to protect him. She ached at the sight, little things scurrying around to do what she couldn’t; Elpida and Shilu and Serin, she owed her new friends so much! She wailed when it seemed like the horrible Black-Iron Necromancer might stride down inside Pheiri without resistance, then cheered when Hafina emerged and knocked the horrible little bitch off Pheiri’s back.

The Black-Iron Necromancer landed in a tangle of metal limbs and torn flesh; Pheiri pounded the crater with his best guns, then accelerated away, leaving the stricken Necromancer behind. Iriko extended flesh-trumpets from her back and hooted a war cry, redoubling her efforts at speed. If she could not help protect Pheiri, she would punish anybody who hurt him.

She was going to eat that Necromancer! Yes she was!

Up on Pheiri’s outer hull, the zombies went forward, Elpida among them. Iriko watched the Black-Iron Necromancer start to pick herself up. She adjusted her course, hurtling through shattered concrete, rearing up so the Necromancer would know exactly what was coming for her.

And then a very bad thing happened.

A tidal wave of black static boiled up and over the horizon, pouring from beneath the distant grey curve of the graveworm, far away to Iriko’s right. Interference scrambled even the most finely tested of Iriko’s sensors, jabbing the core of her mind with nausea and disorientation, hiding the true nature of the onrushing wave. But Iriko didn’t need properly functioning senses to know what was charging across the ruins.

Worm-guard. Hundreds, thousands, more.

Iriko faltered.

She skidded to a stop amid the concrete and rubble, throwing up a little wave of her own, debris raining down around her.

Iriko was terrified of worm-guard. Buried somewhere in the surviving memory fragments of her life before she was made small and vulnerable, she knew that she had been torn apart by a wave of worm-guard once before. When she had been massive and powerful and almost unstoppable, when she could range far beyond the safe zone of any graveworm, she had fought for the chance to feast on a worm’s innards. She had thought herself invincible — and she had been, against everything but the limitless number of worm-guard, with their specialised weaponry, their fire and their chemicals. That was when she had ceased to be whatever she had been before, when she had become Iriko, a small piece, a leftover, a fragment which hid from the destroying swarm.

She had to run.

It was the only option, the only choice. Her body jerked, trying to flee. Her biomass shivered and vibrated, trying to sink into the soil, dig her way into a hiding place. Her refractive mail flickered through camouflage patterns, mirror-finishes, and a dull heat-reflecting black, all to keep those billion eyes off her tiny, vulnerable form.

Run or die. Run or die. Run or die, now!

But the worm-guard would be on Pheiri in seconds. Iriko had no time to think, no time to weigh her options. Would she rather be dead alongside Pheiri, or alive and alone and a coward forever?

Iriko hurled herself forward again, smashing aside drifts of concrete and throwing up showers of shredded black mould.

She extended a dozen trumpets of flesh from her back and hooted her defiance; if she didn’t scream, she was going to sob.

Iriko was going to die. Against seven Necromancers, she might prevail. But against a wave of worm-guard, she was nothing. She would come back, of course. She would resurrect again, in a coffin. She would be different, even smaller and more vulnerable than she was already, more like a zombie than what she was now.

Would she be pretty again, if she died here and came back? Would she return as something small enough to shelter inside Pheiri? Would he like her better that way?

But Iriko didn’t want to change. She didn’t want to be different now. She wanted to be Iriko. She wanted to fly!

The onrushing wave of worm-guard made it so hard to see. Half her senses were scrambled by their interference, no matter what she used — visible light, heat-maps, echolocation, predictive terrain-scanning algorithms, they jammed it all, as if they were inside her head. She knew the Black-Iron Necromancer was right in her path, but she could barely see. She felt herself veer off course, disoriented by the worm-guard, her insides shaking with terror, with the certainty of death and—

「ping? ping ping ping?」

A tightbeam contact, but not from Pheiri. From up and away and over the horizon, from a direction that Iriko had refused to acknowledge.

Hope was calling, knocking on Iriko’s communication protocols with a polite little handshake package. So neat and tidy, prim and pretty.

Iriko wasn’t sure about Hope, the machine-thing up in the sky. Hope was the daughter of that questionable person, Thirteen Arcadia, who had gotten a little too close to Pheiri for Iriko’s comfort. But right now, Iriko didn’t care who was helping, as long as the help came quick.

She accepted the handshake. A new tightbeam connection took shape. Hope and Iriko exchanged basic communication normalisation, packets flickering back and forth in a split-second.

「what what talk fast talk pheiri help need help pheiri talk—」

「k!」

Hope burst through every layer of Iriko’s defences as if they didn’t exist. Comms firewalls, viral loop-back traps, the inner encryption spheres around her mind, all of it was paper before Hope’s smiling barrage. It happened so quickly that Iriko could not even respond, her walls falling before she knew. If Hope wanted her dead or hurt or enslaved, she could have done so without even trying.

In the centre of Iriko’s mind, Hope planted a direct sensor feed, and let it flower open.

Iriko spluttered and gasped under a flood of data — direct real-time video feed from Hope, hanging up there beneath the ceiling of clouds, in greater clarity than even the most delicate of Iriko’s own eyes. Real-colour, false-colour, thermal readout, wind speed, nanomachine density, simulated topography, predictive sub-surface mapping, IR scanning, and more, dozens more ways of seeing and thinking than Iriko knew, most of which she had never even considered before, some of which hurt and burned if she looked too hard.

Iriko’s mind bulged with the sheer weight and density of data, the edges of her consciousness flickering black with inevitable collapse. Too much, it was too much! Iriko scrabbled for a handhold amid the chaos, tried to choke off the sensor feed.

Hope was babbling at her in an endless stream.

「##loop sector rform single -m -5
partial exclude /iriko/self/frag 48271
size unknown -o -m
##loop not found
-def #loop /iriko/self/main?
##loop not found error size
##loop sector rform multi -m -eBv」

Hope guided Iriko back to one of Pheiri’s geometric puzzles — a simple thing, one of the earliest he’d sent her, a flower of mathematics that unfolded at each stroke, with more space inside than outside. Hope drew all of Iriko’s attention to that puzzle. She needed Iriko to do something, something Hope herself could not.

Iriko felt her mind reach breaking point. She was going to burst and die, and forget who and what she was.

But she was dead anyway, wasn’t she? The worm-guard would kill her and Pheiri.

Iriko pushed her mind, like the flower.

And opened.

「ask and you will know,
but wait and never come to,
else fail and forget!」

Iriko did not have time to think about what happened to her, what Hope had just forced her to do. Her mind suddenly felt bigger, as if a vast inner space had opened up within herself. She could grasp all of Hope’s sensor data at once; it was so simple! Had she not been looking at it from the right angle before? Suddenly she saw herself, a racing dot of shimmering metal amid the broken concrete and black mould-spires and twisted steel wreckage. She knew exactly where she was, seen through Hope’s eyes, and exactly how fast she was moving. She saw the rolling wave of worm-guard, revealed for what they were, wriggly masses of black tentacles and muscle, bound inside diamond armour. She saw a lead scout crashing into Pheiri as he tried to turn, the worm-guard clambering up on his hull and plucking a zombie from his open hatch — Elpida!

She saw the Necromancer barely fifty feet away — the Black-Iron Necromancer, the flyer with the beak and the wings, the dirty slut who had hurt Pheiri.

Iriko slammed ahead, tossing chunks of concrete aside. The Necromancer was wounded, but the wounds closed quickly. She straightened up and looked toward Iriko, eyes like chips of obsidian in a face of black metal.

Iriko extended a hundred trumpets and hooted at maximum volume, loud enough to shake the air and scatter chipped concrete. She squealed in a language she thought she’d forgotten.

“Iriko eat you!”

The Necromancer opened her beak and clacked it hard, laughing in her throat.

Iriko was almost upon her — rearing up, spreading out, no escape! The Necromancer stood her ground, raised a hand of claws and knives, a show-off gesture.

「Moron zombie,」 the Necromancer said over open radio.

Iriko crashed like a falling wave. She felt her body start to freeze, stutter-stopping in mid-air; she was not totally immune to Necromancer trickery, as she had learned during her first encounter with a Necromancer, alongside Serin. But there was simply so much of Iriko, so many places within her own body for her to run and hide, too many places where she could think, too many for one Necromancer to freeze all of her all at once.

Part of her froze, then another, then another, but always a part of her could move forward. She was a crashing wave in slow-motion, still inevitable.

The Necromancer, the Black-Iron hussy who had touched Pheiri, cocked her head in mild surprise.

「halt one tide alone,
but still see the wrath and storm
of oceans beyond!」

Iron-Face winced, clacked her beak, and—

And Iriko froze entirely, body held still in place, a wave turned to ice on the edge of the shore.

The Necromancer opened her beak. “How how? How now, zombie cow? How did you do that? Who’s been teaching you nasty tricks? No answer? None. None is none is none. Let’s take you off the stage. Get done!”

The Black-Iron bitch clicked her fingers.

Iriko felt her insides twist, as if a seed of destruction had been planted in her core. One cell, just one, collapsing into nanomachine gunk, pure potential without form. The effect spread, one cell to two, two to four, four to eight, eight to sixteen, accelerating upward.

She was being unravelled. Slow at first, but the end would come all at once.

Iriko tried to struggle, to extend just one single pseudopod or tentacle, to force her body sideways, to escape the runaway collapse inside her own flesh. If she could isolate and eject the compromised cells she might survive, but the Iron-Faced horror was staring at her and she couldn’t move! She couldn’t move and she couldn’t even fight! Pheiri was so close, he needed her so much, a worm-guard clambering all over him, and Iriko had failed, she was worse than a fool, she wasn’t worthy to be anything but a carrion-eater and a bottom-feeder and a coward and—

A pillar of white erupted from the concrete next to the Black-Iron Necromancer, flowing up from within the ground, taking shape from raw matter. A fluttering white dress, a golden fall of wild hair, a single hand outstretched — to grab the Iron-Face by the side of her metal skull.

Another Necromancer. This one, Iriko remembered. Lykke!

“Hiiiiiiiiiii!” Lykke screeched in the other Necromancer’s ear.

Iriko’s body was free. She ejected the compromised cells with enough force to crack concrete.

She crashed into both Necromancers, slamming them to the broken ground and sucking them into her core. She flash-formed a tough pocket of electromagnetic cage and armoured flesh, triple-layering it with iron-laced bone so thick that even a Necromancer would take a few moments to break out. Then she flooded it with the strongest digestive fluids she could metabolise, cranked the pressure up, and heated the result, right to the limit of her own tolerances.

The pair of Necromancers fought for a few seconds, biting and clawing and slicing at each other — then kicked away from the fight. The Black-Iron Necromancer scraped and dug at the walls of Iriko’s improvised ultra-stomach, morphing her limbs into drills and picks and levers. Iriko turned the pressure up, repaired the damage, and kept the Necromancer pinned. Simulated flesh melted from fake bones, and then the bones dissolved too, every last cell of Necromancer flesh rendered down into neutralised nanomachine soup.

Iriko flexed the limits of her new mind. She decided to try Howl’s trick again, unprompted and unguided.

She opened specialised sensory organs deep inside her body, pushed them wide at the exact moment the Black-Iron Necromancer’s body finished turning to liquid, and peered into a stratum of the world she had not known existed.

The network, Howl called it.

She saw a spark.

A dense tangle of data, squirming in every direction like a fractal explosion as it tried to crawl back into the network, trapped momentarily by the electromagnetic cage in Iriko’s guts. The body was not the Necromancer; this was the Necromancer. A soul made of raw data, no different to a zombie, just with more network access.

Iriko formed a new kind of stomach, a stomach in her mind, where this Necromancer could truly be snuffed out. Death, real death, with no escape back into the network, back into resurrection.

Nobody touches Pheiri!

But the moment she attempted the transfer, the chaotic spark slipped through her cells, squirming out though the tiniest gap in the electromagnetic cage. Before she could re-adapt, the Necromancer’s data was gone, shot out of her body like a greased bullet, vanishing into the ground, dissipating back into the network.

Iriko would have been frustrated, but the other Necromancer — Lykke — was doing something very odd.

She had curled herself up into a ball of flesh, to resist Iriko’s digestive juices for a few more seconds. And she was pinging Iriko’s internal comms, asking for a handshake.

Hope suggested she take the call.

「what what melt you melt you what???」

Lykke laughed. 「Heyyyyyyyy there beautiful! Appreciate the assist? Hows about you do me a sweet one in return, and not turn me into soup? Not that it matters too much, but it would take me, oh, a minute or two to get back to my feet, and time is of the essence when bitch-slapping a bunch of upstart cunts like this, don’t you agree?」

「???」

「I know, I know, it’s so hard to pay attention to the little people when you’re as beautiful as you are. I love what you’ve done with the place! You’re a little miracle, aren’t you? Can’t believe Elpida didn’t tell me about you. Which means she probably didn’t tell you about me. Sigh sigh sigh, that’s the fate of a guilty lover-girl, I guess. So, hi! I’m Lykke, I’m one of Elpida’s special friends, and I just gave you a little helping hand with that bitch there. I’d appreciate if you don’t finish eating this body, so I can go help my darling Elpi, okayyyy?」

Iriko didn’t reply. She didn’t know how. She queried Hope instead.

「y!」 said Hope.

Iriko let Lykke go, collapsed the stomach-pocket, and purged her digestive fluids. She spent a second checking her internal integrity, but the collapse process had been halted. She was fine.

But, to Iriko’s surprise, Lykke didn’t flop to the floor. She unfolded herself, no longer a tightly-pressed ball of flesh, but a woman with all of her skin and most of her muscle melted away, now rapidly reforming, raw nanomachines re-weaving themselves into golden hair and a white dress. She kicked free from Iriko’s biomass, up onto Iriko’s back, where she sat with her legs spread, atop Iriko like she was riding a horse.

Lykke spoke over comms, quicker than her mouth could make sounds. 「Mind if I catch a ride, you beautiful blob you? We’re both going the same way, after all! And you’re a speedy girl!」

Iriko didn’t have time to negotiate terms, or to think about why Elpida had another, secret, annoying Necromancer friend. Lykke had helped her to crush the Necromancer who had hurt Pheiri, and that was good enough for Iriko.

“Wheeeeeeeee!” Lykke shrieked as Iriko slammed ahead at full speed; her hair whipped back, her eyes went wide, and her hands clung to Iriko’s hide.

Iriko laughed along with her, hooting from her trumpets, loud enough to make Lykke flinch in surprise.

The tidal wave of worm-guard was almost on Pheiri; he was stuck in a skidding turn, trying to twist away from the rising wall of black static, but one of them was already crouched over him, clinging to his armour, Elpida’s limp body held in its grip.

Iriko was going to die; Lykke was probably going to die with her, if that mattered to Necromancers. But she would die protecting what mattered.

Iriko armed herself — diamond-hard spears beneath her skin, ready to eject with force enough to shatter steel; pockets and sacks of superacid, pressurised and bulging; she extended tendrils of muscle and claw, packed half her biomass into them, and plated them with the best armour she could cook. She readied flash-grown factories in her core, because her first attack might fell a single worm-guard, but then she would face three more, a dozen more, a hundred more, and she would buy Pheiri the space to escape.

She hit the perfect distance — only a few dozen meters out — and sprang like an insect, launching herself from an outcropping of shattered concrete. On her back, Lykke whooped and cheered. Iriko hooted a war cry, extending all her weapons toward the worm-guard, descending in a bright streak of blinding flesh.

The worm-guard let go of Pheiri. It reared back, a black scribble in Iriko’s sensors, but clear as crystal in Hope’s data-feed. It twisted away, trying to escape Iriko’s path.

Elpida was standing on its back.

Feet planted wide, left arm wrapped in exposed worm-guard muscle, stump of her right arm plugged into whatever the worm-guard used for a nervous system. She looked up, right at Iriko, at the arc of her fall.

She grinned wide. Elpida and Howl grinned together, but somebody else grinned with them, another set of movements in Elpida’s facial muscles.

“Hey blobbo!” Howl roared at the top of her lungs. “Get on board, girlie! We’re gonna rip open some Necromancer!”

Iriko was so surprised she fumbled her trajectory. She missed the worm-guard entirely, her weapons whipping back as she realised the thing wasn’t targeting her. None of the worm-guard were targeting her. The wave was sweeping ahead of Pheiri on both sides, leaving a space for him to turn and run.

「pheiri pheiri panic pheiri what do what do need land landing iriko fumble iriko fall iriko—」

「minimum convoy range EXCLUDE. danger close approval」

Pheiri fed Iriko a tidy package of angle and speed calculations.

Iriko twisted in the air, reaching out with her tentacles, her weapons absorbed back into her body, her flesh about to impact on the concrete. If she landed now, at this angle, she would be spread across meters of broken ground, and it would take precious minutes to pull herself together. Whatever miracle Elpida had worked with the worm-guard, they would still swarm over her, immobile and helpless.

But she followed Pheiri’s instructions. She made the angle right, she whipped out with her tentacles just so, flared her body to slow herself by just that fraction of a second. Pheiri slewed sideways, skidded across the concrete scree, right beneath her.

Iriko’s tentacles caught an outcrop of Pheiri’s armour, and Pheiri caught Iriko.

She landed with a jarring splat on Pheiri’s upper deck, losing fifteen percent of her biomass, splattering across Pheiri’s armour. She was spread out, slowed and wounded, dazed by the impact.

But she was safe, right on top of Pheiri, the closest she’d ever been. And he was speeding away from the oncoming wave.

Lykke staggered free from the liquid mess, broken limbs cracking back into place, turning to gape at what Pheiri left behind. Iriko saw too, from her own eyes and Hope’s data-stream, from Pheiri’s alarmed messages over the tight-beam, from the shrieking voices of half of a dozen zombies inside Pheiri’s hull.

The wave of worm-guard was not stopping; the other remaining Necromancers were turning and fleeing now, fleeing alongside Pheiri, though the wave made no spaces for them, not like it did for him.

Elpida and Howl — and somebody else within, a blue flicker behind Elpida’s eyes — stood atop a worm-guard like it was a steed, riding the crest of the wave.

Iriko had no idea what was happening. She was too dazed to figure it out.

Pheiri told her not to worry, and hold on tight.

Previous Chapter Next Chapter

Iriko is such a good girl. Such elegance, such style! Such a way with poetry. Best blobbo.

Anyway! Here we are, arc 17! This one is going to be quite short and snappy, I think? Maybe just 6 chapters, though behind the scenes it’s already expanded a little. Things are moving fast, and I don’t just mean Pheiri and Iriko. Though, when you look at things from a certain angle, this is their very first actual hug, right?

Also also also! There will be a chapter next week, on Christmas Day! I’d actually forgotten that Christmas was, well, a thing, which was a bit odd??? I totally didn’t realise I’d be publishing over Christmas this year, but I’m comfortably a little bit ahead right now, so there will be a chapter up next week, as usual.

In the meantime, I have more art to share, from over on the Discord server! This week I have something really quite amazing. Pheiri, modeled in Lego Digital Designer, (by demi.demi!) I understand that this project was incredibly complex and took a huge amount of effort, so, bravo!!! It’s amazing to see Pheiri brought to such detailed life. If you want to see more images of the complete build, head over to the fanart page and scroll down to the bottom; there’s a whole series of images from different angles! This is one of the most incredible bits of fanart I’ve ever seen, thank you so much!

Meanwhile, if you want more Necroepilogos right away, or you would like to support the story, please consider subscribing to the Patreon:

Patreon link! It’s here!

Right now this only offers a single chapter ahead, about 5k words. Behind the scenes I’m plugging away, and hope to offer more chapters ahead in the future!

There’s also a TopWebFiction entry! Voting makes the story go up in the rankings, which helps more people see it! This only takes a couple of seconds, and it really helps!

And thank you, dear readers! Thank you so much for being here and reading my little story about zombie girls and blob girls and worm girls and all the other kinds of undead girls doing undead girl stuff (sometimes even with each other). I couldn’t do any of this without all of you, the readers! I’ll seeya next chapter. Until then!