“You do understand attempting to drink liquor will not work with the fractal of resilience active within you.” Urs said, walking over the white melting snow.

By the mountaintop, next to the ancient gold temple, built several thousand years before them, Talen sat and watched the dawn break over the world. An occult dome erected around him, holding the steep temperatures at bay.

Urs passed through the bubble with little difficulty, noting the change of temperature striking enough to cause his metal implants to creak on expansion. Fully within tolerances, although he still flared out the fractal of Resilience to make sure his organic parts equalized with the expanding metal.

Talen remained at the center of the defense, staring blankly ahead over the white wastes. “It works if I focus on keeping it down. Maybe you should try it at some point yourself. A simple buzz to feel human again.”

Melancholy. Urs was somewhat getting better at telling Talen’s mood from the tone in his voice.

He strode to the side and slowly sat himself down next to the smaller human. “You are sad. Are you nervous about your upcoming travels?”

The man laughed, “Nervous? Urs, I cannot die. Even if the rocket explodes before I reach the station, I will simply wake up a few minutes later back on earth, ready to make another attempt. Tsuya has prepared seven different attempts to reach orbit. One of these will surely work.”

“Perhaps you fear you will fail to set the upgrades as needed? You will have a crew of humans who are dedicated to the task, you need not worry. They are highly competent and prepared for the one way trip.”

Talen shook his head. "We don’t have time for second guesses or doubts, there won’t ever be another moment to slip past their notice. A01 will be brought back within three days at minimum. And likely all the more angry at having finally gotten his head cut by my hand. No, I am not here drinking to calm my nerves. The work will be done. I have it memorized.”

“Celebration then? For the victory?” Had he completely misunderstood the tone earlier? “You do not look happy.”

“I'm not." He lifted the bottle to an imaginary salute. One that Urs recognized was a sign to honor the dead.

“Ah. Who was it?”

“Drathomir.” Talen said with a steep inhale of breath. “The report arrived earlier this morning. He died a day ago, in my absence.”

“That is unfortunate.” Urs carefully answered, deciding on how to cheer up his friend. “I have met the man only three times, however I am certain he has no regrets of his death or how he spent his life, if that is your worry. He would understand it was more important for you to be here.”

“I forget sometimes that you have been an immortal for far longer than I have.” Talen choked a laugh for a moment. “I don’t regret not being underground in the fight when it happened. Drathomir understood duty like I do.”

He took a swig of the bottle, drinking deeply, before tilting the bottle over the melting snow, pouring a full shot’s worth of liquid all over the rocks.

Urs remained silent, waiting. He’d learned sometimes humans didn’t need solutions. They only needed to be heard.

“I remember him even now, cracking jokes at my expense right on my wedding. I nearly punched him for the irreverence that day. Now, I realize how fine his jokes aged. He had been correct on them all."

Urs remembered. Talen had told Yarish he would marry her only when he'd finally brought all the cities together into the alliance.

She'd believed him, and worked tirelessly at his side to do so.

Drathomir had absolutely lambasted Talen for being a coward afraid of not being good enough for her hand, so he had to go on and become a legend just to not feel like an imposter.

Although Urs knew it would be hyperbole to claim a part of Talen 'died' the day she did, he somehow found the saying to be rather fitting. Talen was never the same after she was gone.

"He was the last of them all." Talen said. "Every single one, along with Yarish. Now, all ghosts of the past.”

Urs didn't know what to say that would help his friend. So he remained silent, listening.

“I had hoped he would die of old age, watching the war long won. I knew it wouldn’t come to happen, of course. The harder we press the machines back, the more they press forward. Now there are nearly forty of those godforsaken Feathers, and only one of me." Talen looked down, defeated. "I knew he would die long before I finished the war. I knew, and it still caught me by surprise when he did."

“I see.” Urs held a hand out to take the bottle. He did not particularly like the taste of liquor, and it would have no effect on him even if he were to tamper down the fractal of Resilience. But he had known Drathomir. And among Talen’s culture, drinking a toast to the dead was something that was done. Many cities did the same.

He was not great at speeches, but surely he could do this much.

“To Drathomir.” Urs said, holding the bottle in the traditional toast. “A good friend.”

The dreadful thing went up, and Urs took a few deep gulps before passing it over to the man he utterly dwarfed in size on his left.

“To Drathomir.” Talen repeated the motion. “The last of my old friends.”

Urs noted there was a raise in his voice, which meant there was a strong emotional reaction at this phrase. Perhaps that was the melancholy that Talen carried?

“Tsuya and yourself have a friendship, I believe.”

Talen started laughing, “Ah, you and your blunt comments. She is an eldritch being too far divorced from humanity. Who knows what she means by friendship? She cannot be trusted.”

“You were the one who introduced her to me.” Urs insisted. “She was your friend originally.”

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“She cannot be trusted.” Talen repeated. “She tells me she has changed, that she sees hope again with the two of us here now. But we both know she is capable of saying and doing anything if she calculates it to be the most optimal move forward for humanity. Perhaps she has calculated claiming we are friends might improve my odds of success by one one hundredth.” He shook his head, then looked out into the wide wastes beyond.

A direct result of Tsuya’s harsh emotionless planning. Even Urs considered it particularly ruthless as a plan. Effective however. As expected of her.

He considered it must certainly be a lonely existence from where she stood, if she were truely honest about her claims. He would never know. They never could with a being that could calculate so far beyond them, any proof could just as easily be considered deception. “There must be plenty of humans.” Urs said, hoping that was the right set of words to help Talen.

“Everyone after knew me as the alliance grand commander. Or now, as the Emperor." Talen shook his head. "Sycophants at best, opportunists at worst.

You are all I have left, Urs.”

The video screen the Icon was populating showed complete chaos all around the enemy lines, as hundreds of his machines made their attempt on Talen.

The man barely noticed.

He simply shambled forward, back hunched slightly, eyes staring either at the road right ahead of his feet, or at something attacking from a distance that very quickly was put to rest. He didn’t run, but neither did he ever stop. As if walking was all he knew how to do.

Everything that tried to attack him was cut into pieces, blown away by the wind soon after.

Every now and then, his eyes would brush past the citadel, and for a moment it seemed like a flicker of recognition passed through. Each time, it was wiped away soon after.

A few Feathers got too big for their heads, and tried to rush him with occult shields lit up bright. Probably thinking their personal set of powers would be enough to get them through.

They were crushed before they made it within ten feet. Got to admit, after watching him break through everything by pure occult power, I think that sword hiding under his rags hadn’t actually been used in years now.

The biome here equally didn’t hold him off. Occult strings whipped around in the wind, slicing the majority of Avalis’s overextended forces, but all of it hit the old emperor’s domed shield, sliding off.

“He does not allow it to connect with his defenses.” Urs said, already predicting what I was thinking of. “Occult edges are a surface area problem. He once explained to me his methods. To me they were largely too difficult to keep in focus at all times. I believe at this point they are largely reflex to him. Your knightbreakers will not work against him.”

And neither would shooting bullets. He’d simply stop the bullets at range to start with. Wave based attacks, physical attacks, even long range occult attacks would fail over his different defenses.

Each time he’d died, he’d learned and built a defense against it. And Relinquished had tried a lot of stunts over the years to kill him. Or rather, A57, before A01 finally caught him.

The real danger was that Talen was capable of manifesting the fractal of division with his mind, and moving the concept of it within his surroundings. Like a hidden blade that swept downwards through something. Nobody could see it, it would simply appear and slice through. At best, there might be a faint visible trail of occult.

Urs could do the same, and had shown it in the fight with Conviction.

There were two weakpoints to it. First, it would take a half second to fully manifest. Which meant anything standing still or moving too slowly would be cut from the inside out. So first rule of engagement when fighting Talen was to always be moving while in range of his invisible blades.

Secondly, those were still occult concepts. If I or anyone with the skills, was close enough to reach a soul tendril out to those concepts before they materialized completely, we could dispel it following Hexis’s teachings about messing with occult concepts.

Problem was that unlike Urs, he could pull off several hundred fractal concepts all around him at the same moment. How he could do that was something even Urs didn’t know or understand. The old god on my back was an engineer and problem solver first. He tinkered with occult fractals and merged them together.

Talen wielded them like a blade. And empowered them with the fractal of Resolve, which would magnify their ability and potency by several hundred fold.

With Urs’s quantum fractal, I had some hope the sheer amount of Keiths all dedicated to one reality might be enough to outnumber his defenses.

Basically, if he could summon one hundred blades, I just needed one hundred and one Keiths. In theory at least.

“All right, everyone ready?” I called out over comms. At this point, the imperial army here would serve only as distractions, and I really didn’t want to rely on them for that.

The Icon was steadily sending them away, topside.

They were excellent soldiers who could potentially change the field of battle everywhere else in the world. They couldn't die here, thrown like mooks into the meat grinder.

The Citadel was rapidly left with only the old Deathless, still channeling the shield over the walls, and the skeleton crew keeping weapons on those walls firing out at anything getting too close.

Talen would be in range soon enough.

But for the Icon, Urs, and I? That soon enough was right now.

Urs flared the fractal of Resolve, and empowered his quantum fractal further, tapping into an even larger infinite set. And among that infinite set, far smaller set was selected.

In every other reality, the Keith of that timeline simply told the Icon to wait.

But among one in a thousand, the Keith of that timeline told the Icon one word: “Go.”

Ninety portals opened up all around me, and every Keith connected focused on a single one.

Around Talen, right beyond the range of his division fractals, ninety portals opened up, surrounding him on all sides. And an entire army of occult ghosts flew through, swarming straight for him.

Some part of him seemed to wake at that. As if sensing a real threat.

He lifted his left hand out. The concept of basic heat appeared just above. And flared out.

A single flash of light and every bit of my army was wiped out, leaving only melting rock and machine metal around him.

My second wave of attack Keiths were already on their way to repeat the doomed charge.

The old emperor glanced up, watching me through an open portal. Old eyes locking sight across the tiny window in space and time, spotting us on the other end.

“Urs.” Talen spoke.

Urs disconnected from his quantum fractal, cutting me out of the greater reality. Seven occult domes flashed into existence in the vault, layered one over the other, between us and Talen as Urs focused purely on defense above all other considerations.

An invisible occult force raced from Talen’s glare, straight through that portal, and slammed into the defenses, ripping them apart one after another.

It finally rammed directly into us, throwing us several dozen feet upwards, just after the Icon closed the portal completely, flatlining every portal as well to cut Talen’s attack vectors off. We were still squashed into the side of the vault, the wall groaning outwards around us, leftover occult crackling over Urs’s final line of defense.

We both fell straight back down into the thawing ice under, cracking through with a splash, Journey taking the impact easily enough.

“All right, we might have a problem.” I said, getting back on my feet, checking that Urs remained secure. “Are you doing okay?”

“I have been better.” Urs spoke. He’d been squashed between a relic armor and a wall, but he’d clearly handled the damage. For a limbless husk, he was certainly taking all the events like a champ. “Although I understand the madness within him may be more difficult to undo.”

“You learned something from seeing him up close?”

“I know his behavior patterns. He recognized me as an enemy. I need to study his soul more closely to see how A57 has broken his mind, and administer the correct patch.”

The Icon’s video footage of the old emperor continued on my HUD. The remaining occult ghosts send his way through the portals vanished, broken apart by his will. Slices of fading occult cutting through each with ease.

He remained staring upward to his right the entire time. At the same place the closest occult portal had been spawned.

Where he had been looking at us both through.

Then slowly turned his gaze to the citadel beyond. And with the same steady motions, he lifted his right hand up, the rags moving out of the way.

Held in his hand, was a simple occult longsword.

“Evacuate the citadel walls.” Urs simply said. “Now.”