I will not bow, I will not break
I will shut the world away
I will not fall, I will not fade
I will take your breath away
I Will Not Bow – Breakng Benjamin
October 22, 2958; Infinite Forest, Mercury
"Construction site," Azra murmured. "What are they building?"
The two Guardians were perched on a high platform looking down on the bustle of Vex activity below. Azra scanned the site through the scope of her rifle; Osiris was tangling strings of Light in his glowing cubes and muttering under his breath.
"Do you see Sagira?" the Warlock paused to ask.
"No," Azra replied. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath in, tasting the air. "But I feel her. Is… does what they're building have something to do with her? Is that why they took her?"
"It's a moot point," Osiris said. "I am ready." He carefully inserted Sagira's shell into his construct. "What is your plan?"
Their battlefield was very open, plain Vex stone and brass. The only cover was a handful of stone blocks scattered seemingly at random throughout the space. Even worse, this construction site was suspended above an abyss. If one of them went off, their Ghost would have to be quick with a transmat. "You go left, I'll go right," Azra decided.
"Simple," the Warlock said in dry doubt.
"We don't have time for complex shit." Azra did a quick final weapons check, making sure all of her magazines were full and her safeties were off. "How long is it going to take you?"
"It's hard to say," Osiris replied. "A few minutes, perhaps."
The Hunter re-settled herself like a cat about to pounce. "I can distract Panoptes for a few minutes, easy."
"How do you plan to keep its attention?"
"I'm thinking… Rocket Launcher," the Hunter said. She slid on a helmet and took another few deep breaths. "Okay. Okay. No time to waste, right? Let's do this."
Azra jumped off of the platform. It didn't hit her until halfway down how crazy this situation was. Knowledge was the chief tool against the Vex- Kabr's raid on the Vault of Glass would probably have been victorious if they had only known what they were up against. Azra had since taken her intimate knowledge of the Collective and used it as a weapon against them. But although she knew the Vex in general very well, she did not know Panoptes. She had only speculation and second-hand research on what exactly the Infinite Forest was for and what it was capable of.
And she'd just leapt into battle against it with nothing but the flimsiest of plans and a single grumpy, Ghostless Warlock to back her up. She was smarter than this. She should know better than to start this fight.
Too late for that sentiment. Her boots had hardly touched the ground before Panoptes screeched in disapproval. It glared down at her. Azra hefted her rocket launcher nervously. One hit, then move, she told herself. Already Vex frames were springing into existence around her. It was an agonizing few seconds waiting for the tracking system on the launcher to latch on to Panoptes's eye.
It gave its soft confirmational beep and the highlighting on the sights turned green. Azra braced herself and pulled the trigger. The launcher kicked into her shoulder as the missile went streaking away.
She didn't have the opportunity to watch it track its way towards the Vex Mind. A Minotaur sprang forward from nowhere, knocking into her. Azra took the motion and turned it into a roll, flicking a smoke bomb into her fingers. She came up and chucked it at the Minotaur's face. A second later, a cloud of purple smoke engulphed the Minotaur, Azra, and the Goblins who had been trying to edge on her flanks.
Direct hit, Spark reported as Azra reloaded the launcher. She couldn't see the Mind; Panoptes's scream was her only indication that she'd hit it at all.
By the time the smoke cleared, Azra had taken up a slightly more defensible position on top of one of the stone blocks. It wouldn't last longer than it took to fire off another shot, but at least no Minotaurs could try to stomp on her.
Panoptes had already turned its attention away from her. Azra wondered if it could detect Osiris's presence. Could it sense whatever he was doing to re-locate his Ghost? Perhaps Panoptes had just assumed Azra had been taken care of already.
She broke that assumption happily. She let an ear-piercing whistle out of her external speakers and hefted her launcher again. "Look at me, you giant outdated toaster!" she shouted. Panoptes turned just in time to be hit in the eye again. Azra chucked an Arc grenade at the Vex frames that had swarmed the base of her tower, pulled the invisibility trick for good measure, and then legged it off to find another decent vantage point.
This was complicated.
It would have been complicated enough if his Ghost had been right in front of him- haphazardly crammed into the wrong shell or not. For all of the Hunter's insistence of Sagira's presence here, Osiris could find no evidence of it. It would have been complicated enough in a controlled laboratory setting, much less in the middle of a battle. But these were the only circumstances chance had allowed him. He would have to make do.
Azra was making good on her promise to keep the Vex Mind distracted. Every twenty seconds or so there would be an explosion and Panoptes would screech in a simulation of rage. Osiris could remain unbothered on his concealed perch while he worked.
He tuned out the noise of violence and narrowed his focus to a single point.
He cast his nets wide, filtering for paracausal energies. His construct snagged a moment around the Hunter and her Ghost, but tore when she flexed her Light to disintegrate the Vex around her. Osiris hastily repaired his sieve and continued to skim. She had to be here, somewhere. She had to be. He'd balanced the future of Humanity on that fact.
He was actually a bit surprised when something else caught. He closed his makeshift Ghost-catcher slowly: redefining borders, tightening the loops. The technique was actually one the Praxic order used in their Ghost-locking technology. By constraining her signature to the confines of her shell, he could forcefully re-locate her.
So he tightened things bit by bit, careful of rips and tears, drawing everything in as fast as he dared. He narrowed possibilities and the superposition of the signature slowly collapsed into something more recognizable.
It wasn't until he had eliminated every option except for the one- Sagira, if she had been in his net at all, had no other possible location to exist than the space occupied by her shell- that he knew it was her. She condensed out of the ether like liquid water from vapor, terrified and confused and disoriented. But she was there. The light in her core flickered and then ignited into brilliance.
Osiris had many feelings. He was relieved. He was grateful. Most of all, he was in disbelief- that the Hunter had been telling the truth, that this hadn't been a trap, that she hadn't been part of some scheme to trick him. He brushed the emotions aside. His wavering connection to the Light strengthened and swelled. Solar brilliance flooded his veins.
"What's going on?" Sagira asked.
"We are fighting Panoptes," Osiris answered bluntly. There was another explosion and another screech as Azra fired a round of ordinance at the Vex Mind. Osiris heard a vibrant boom and a shout as the Hunter dodged ordinance in turn. Panoptes, it seemed, had simulated a few Cyclopses while Osiris had been distracted.
"Well, let's get to it already," Sagira said urgently.
Osiris raised his fist and the ringing cry of his Dawnblade echoed across the battlefield.
Azra let out a private sigh of relief when she heard Osiris's Dawnblade shriek. The Vex were swarming. She was finding herself with fewer tenable positions and slimmer margins of time to line up her shots. Her reserves were empty; she'd almost resigned herself to trying to make a few long-range with her Golden Gun.
She let out an even bigger sigh of relief when Spark reported that he'd been pinged by Sagira. Azra motioned for him to open up the comms feed as she ducked out of the way of a Cyclops blast.
"You did it," Sagira said without preamble. There was a disbelieving gratitude in her voice- almost bordering on awe. "You actually did it."
"I said I would," Azra replied. A Goblin lunged at her and she stabbed it absentmindedly, jerking the blade out and shoving the frame at an approaching Minotaur to buy herself a second of space. "How are you doing?"
"Fine," Osiris said. There was a grunt of effort on the feed and Azra heard the telltale whistling screech of a Dawnblade pinwheeling through the air. Panoptes warbled in protest at the new assault.
"You've got a good sense of timing," Azra remarked. "I'm fresh out of rockets." She slid her way behind one of the few stone pillars and took a moment to catch her breath.
"Don't you have synths?" Sagira asked judgmentally.
"We do, but I haven't had a spare moment to use them," Spark huffed.
"If you just saved more room for reserves, you wouldn't have this problem," Sagira complained.
"If I didn't save room for synths, we wouldn't have any rocket ammo in the first place."
"Enough," Osiris interrupted. "This is not the time for debate; it is the time for assault."
"Alright then, what's the plan?" Azra asked.
"Shoot at it," Osiris said simply. "It has already sustained a fair amount of damage. Though I believe Light-based attacks would yield better results, based on the weaknesses of the Forest's simulations."
"I don't have much I can do that's got the range," Azra said. "Not too great a shot with the Golden Gun and I'm swamped enough here as it is." She lobbed a grenade underhand at a pack of Harpies that had zeroed in on her. Watching them fall apart as lightning chained through them was always a satisfying sight.
"Then you will clear out the frames," Osiris said. "I will handle Panoptes."
Osiris called on all of the remembered fury of Mercury's burning sands. He remembered the lush gardens that had once blanketed the planet. He recalled with clinical detail how the Vex had stripped it all away. There was nothing now to temper the Sun's harsh light. So too would his rage remain unshadowed.
He soared across the battlefield on wings of fire. Where he went, an army of Reflections followed, shielding him from attack and blocking Panoptes's attempts to simulate support. His focus was a red-hot wire, cutting through the chaotic chaff of the battle below until his mind's eye was clear of everything but Panoptes and his own will.
Osiris rained a hell's worth of molten Flame down on the Vex Mind. He burned holes in its superstructure and tore of chunks of plating in two. It was almost pitifully easy; this was not a Frame designed for combat. The Vex never thought they'd be confronted in their own programs.
The Vex could not simulate Light. They could hardly approximate it. But it appeared that, even with their limited knowledge, the Vex realized that they were going to lose this fight. Osiris landed on a floating stone platform and braced himself for a final assault.
Panoptes changed tactics.
It let out a musical cry and slammed its hands together in a ritual gesture. It was a failsafe program, a Vex version of a debugger or an antivirus. (As they were the Pattern, there was little difference to them between random error and malicious code.) The Forest dumped its cached data and attempted to reset the simulation.
The issue this caused: Osiris and Sagira were not a part of the original simulation. Immediately the program screeched to a halt, the full force of Panoptes's will snagged on Osiris's existence. All of his Reflections winked out. His breath was knocked out of him as space itself protested his presence. The air scorched against Osiris's skin like the touch of Radiolaria. "It's trying to delete us!" Sagira warned.
Osiris sidestepped it simply, like he would sidestep one of Saint-14's punches. He counteracted the command, fast-forwarded through it so the action returned a positive response without actually completing. The burning sensation abated from his skin. He summoned his Blade once again.
But still, an inhuman howl of pain echoed over the stone. Osiris's heart jumped in alarm. In the moment, he had forgotten that he wasn't the only one here. He wasn't used to looking after anyone but himself.
He located her instantly, staggered on the ground below. Osiris gripped his sword in white-knuckled panic. It was almost too late. He had only a second to distract Panoptes enough that its program might tear, lest the might of the Forest override her individual strength-
Something else happened instead. Something cracked. And it was not the Hunter that fractured.
"No!" she screamed in defiance. Her Light was like a dying star, burning like a supernova as she hefted the weight of the Infinite Forest. Then that weight shattered, breaking like a wave against a cliff.
She wore something on her arm, a kite-shaped shield that rippled with a power not her own.
"I will exist!" she shouted, planting her feet, squaring her shoulders, glaring up at Panoptes. "I WILL."
A curious thing happened as Osiris watched: the simulation shifted. No longer were they on a site of Vex construction, but deep in a familiar cave. The facets of the walls glowed with bluish light, reflecting and glittering as they shifted imperceptibly. Before them was not Panoptes, but a towering Vex figure.
Osiris knew that figure, though he'd never faced it himself. Atheon, Time's Conflux. The Mind at the heart of the Vault of Glass.
The Hunter was surrounded by faint impressions- echoes of Guardians not present. They all paled in comparison to her shining glory, except for one.
A Titan stood there, a hand of Azra's shoulder. He was clad in the bronze and glowing white of the Hezen Protective. He turned his head almost mechanically, the single red eye of his helmet seeming to transfix Osiris from a distance.
Then the moment passed and they were back in the Forest, facing against Panoptes.
Azra widened her stance and the Light swelled, growing sharper. The smooth curve of probability narrowed, shedding off possibilities until it became a needle, razor-sharp, and nothing could happen except for what the Guardian wanted- until even that disappeared. In the space left behind, there was an explosion.
Panoptes screamed. If it had been angry before, now it was desperate. Scared.
It was like it had been back in the Vault. Every cell in Azra's body sang with energy. She felt unstoppable: as fast and forceful as if she had a raging current at her back, as sharp and focused as if her mind were a spotlight, as strong and steady as if she had lead in her bones. The Aegis tore through reality and the universe bled Light.
She fired off another shot, feeling like a living cannon. Panoptes blocked the projectile with a hand and lost three of its fingers for its effort. When a Minotaur tried to stomp on her, she bashed it aside. It didn't have time to die before it fell apart into errors and impossibly-edged artifacts. Her heart pounded a loud, steady rhythm in her chest. She had the urge to dance, to sing. No Vex scheme could trap her with the Aegis on her arm. No simulation could stand up to the force of its ontology.
She located Osiris above her, silhouetted by the simulated Sun. "You just gonna float there all day, old man?" she shouted up to him.
"You… what?" the Warlock replied. Seems he'd been stunned wordless by Azra's display.
"I told you I killed Atheon," Azra asserted. She blocked the bolt from a Cyclops, feeling no more impact than if someone had thrown a pebble at her shield. She fired back and the Cyclops disappeared in a bloom of Light. "And I don't lie," she concluded. "We killing this thing or what?"
Osiris, to his credit, shook off the shock quickly. He dropped to the ground, disintegrating the frames around him with a shockwave of fire. Azra skidded over and swatted another Cyclops bolt out of the way while he rose to his feet.
The two of them stood together, looking up into the red spotlight of Panoptes's eye.
"This is gonna be easy," Sagira remarked.