It's not enough. It will never be enough. Look at me, Naeko. Gaze into my eyes and heed my words, for you know them to be true. You know them to be true, despite the pain it brings you. It will never be enough. You can continue torturing that woman like she is your personal doll, that she is your personal effigy of pain, and it will not be enough.

I'm not telling you to stop. I cannot judge you for what you have done. I do not know your pain; of all the things I know about you, your pain is not one of them. I do not feel it. No one truly feels it. Even a Necrojack who has dived deep into your very being cannot feel it. They don't understand. They will not understand. There is too much context, too much nuance to being you.

But this I do know: the pain you are looking to inflict, that feeling—it may never come. Vengeance is a cold thing. Sometimes there is no depth of pain you can truly inflict on another after they have wounded you, have scarred you, because they have taken something from you, they cannot give back.

And it is because of this absence that some people turn to delusion. They say the vengeance was unjustified. They say to let go. I say not. I say you decide, but decide with this understanding: it will never be enough.

-Jaus Avandaer to Samir Naeko

37-3

End-Times Arms Race (III)

Three columns of fire materialized before Cas. Three columns of fire that wove three beings into shape. There was a tinge of gold within the fire as well. Avo was using time itself to pull these people from the real world into this temporal dimension.

Cas took a step back as his heart began to pound fast. His blood ran cold, then hot, then cold again. A whiplash swept through him. He wasn't sure how he was about to react. But for so long, in his darkest dreams, in his bitterest moments, he'd hoped to face these people. To face the people who have scarred him so. To look at them. To... to... Strangely enough, he never got to that point. There was a vague feeling that he might kill them, and at times he considered torturing people, but that wasn't who Cas was. Deep down inside, he never had that true cruelty.

He'd done terrible things to further the way and liberation of humanity. He'd done grave things to himself as well. Things he would never be able to face. Things he prayed to be absolved for but didn't know if the Lord would ever forgive him. Yet despite all this, despite all his prayers, all his hopes, all his dreams, in this very moment, he found himself faced with a fantasy. A fantasy of revenge. A fantasy of relief. A fantasy now made manifest at the hands of a god seeking to be above all other gods.

The first individual that came into shape was a towering Scaarthian. Her face had a trail of three scars running underneath each eye, and a chain of bronze daggers swayed from her many braids. She looked surprised, and her fists were clenched. She was dressed in a large but badly damaged combat-skin, and in her hands was a large frequency blade, partially embossed by blood. Blood that simply couldn't be displaced, even as the blade quivered at a rapid pace. She turned, and though she almost swung on Avo, she paused. She recognized who he was. "Phew," she breathed.

Avo reached out with an Echohead, but rather than harming her, he simply tapped her atop the head. "Father," Avo declared.

Just then, another figure was forged into existence, this one far smaller than the Scaarthian. Their face was thin, emaciated even. They looked terrible, like they'd spent their lifetime enduring cruel torture after cruel torture. The man squinted at the light as he held his hands up. He wore ragged clothes, but Cas noted something that didn't belong. His body was dramatically enhanced. His muscles were like strings instead of the usual connected tissues.

His eyes had the gleam of a Tetrothal-4 optical implants, something that snipers preferred. More importantly, there were the gun ports under his arms, gun ports that were well-maintained and in pristine condition.

This wasn't a man who'd been tortured. This wasn't a homeless vagrant on the street or some razor boy fallen from grace. This one was still a killer. Still a weapon of the Guilds, pretending to be something else.

And then the final figure emerged. This one flickered beneath Avo's flame for a moment, and the gold within the fire grew almost unbearable to look at. When they finally arrived, Cas found himself staring at a Scaarthian mid-transition. For a moment he saw a tall, thin woman, but then there came a sudden jump, and in her place was a man who shared her features but was broader, shorter, and had several golden ports along his body.

Chrono-Frame pilot, Cas realized.

"Mother," Avo said, reaching out with an echo-head and tapping the Guilder operative wearing rags. "Brother," and with a final Echohead, he tapped the last of the group, the Scarthian.

Three murderers of Cas's family all shared a similar reaction. They were all confused, they were all astonished, they were all speechless for a moment. But then there came more fires, more loading in the background, more and more, hundreds. The room was filled in an instant. What followed after the three were mostly unremarkable personnel. They looked like logistics people, or potentially someone who worked for a corp, well-dressed and utterly terrified at the alien setting they found themselves in. Then there were the people from the streets.

Cas could recognize them from their movements alone—jerking, twitching, the movements of someone who'd done a little too much Nova to give themselves an edge in combat, and then kept doing Nova outside of combat just to cope with what they've done.

Soon, the small space was entirely filled. There came an atmosphere, a stench in the air, the sweat of mingled bodies cramped together waiting for a concert to start. But the sweat here stank. It was cold instead of hot, and the people here didn't want to be here, weren't asked to be.

And this was something else that wasn't like Avo. He leaned toward choice and permission, unless you were his enemy. But with these Guilders, with the peace he was trying to broker and the conference he was about to set up, were the Guilders Avo's enemy anymore?

Was this what he was trying to show me? Cas wondered. That he still despised the Guilders? That he still regarded them as an enemy, the people he would take choice from? Is he trying to make up for my feelings this way?

Avo regarded him but didn't say a word.

Instead, it was one of the first three who spoke, the Sanctian. His eyes widened. He pointed to Cas. "Cas eld’Canduir," he breathed.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Cas snapped to him, his nostrils flared. But instead of saying anything, instead of responding with violence or even demanding Avo take him away, Cas acted instinctively, reactively. He plucked a string on his guitar, a string that became two, then three, and then flowed on some more.

"You know who I am?" Cas asked.

"Yes," the man breathed. "Yes," the Sanctian repeated. "Yes," he said for a third time, his face twisting in a mask of near-reverent joy.

Cas was completely caught off guard. Of all the emotions he expected to see on the man's face, joy was not one of them.

"Perhaps it was terror, perhaps it was... I've been waiting for this day. I was..." He clenched his jaw, and he took in a long breath. "I'm sorry. I'm terribly sorry. If you want to kill me, I'd understand, but I'd ask you to hold back. Stop. I am Judas-Six."

Cas's eyes widened. "What?"

Judas-Six was one of Cas’s oldest cult operatives in Sanctus. One embedded so deep Cas had never met them before.

"I am Judas-Six," the Sanctian repeated. "I was the man who oversaw the interrogation of your brother. I was there. I was there when he expired." The man began to babble. "At first, I was tasked with hunting you down. The last... the last of the Shepherd Cult. But I started following you. I started picking up some of your scripture. I started..." He reached into his jacket and he pulled out something.

Cas's eyes grew even wider. The man was holding a fucking Bible. And Cas recognized that Bible. He recognized all his Bibles. He inscribed them personally. He pieced them together. He left them in places for the faithful and for those he believed to be capable of conversion to receive. Many of those people he didn't meet. It was just something for them to follow along, to find and discover themselves. Within there were instructions, there were details about what lobbies to go to, what codes and sequences to use within those lobbies to tune in to Cas's broadcast.

And the Sanctian continued. "But I kept digging in, and I started reading the scripture. I really started looking into it, and I realized. I realized how wrong I was. I realized how many bad things I had been doing, that this was all a lie, that I had been serving the Demiurgos."

Cas's jaw was hanging wide open. Of all the things he expected, of all the tribulations he anticipated in his life... This was the interrogator of his brother, the murderer of his brother, converted due to his brother's death because he was chasing Cas, because he was hot on his heels.

"I... I started tuning into your broadcast thirty years ago," the Sanctian admitted. "At first, it was just for information, to get a profile of you, but then I kept listening. I kept listening. I understood. I'm a lottery winner. My parents were lottery winners. I didn't belong in the Tiers. I did everything I could to fit in there, everything. I went further. I did the job that no one else wanted to, and I sold my soul doing it."

The Sanctian was practically yelling now. "I... your words were the truth. I realize that now. But if you want to strike me down for what I have done, you are right. I have sinned. I am, as you have described, one of all sinners. We have all done wrong in the eyes of the Lord. But right now," the Scarthian got down on his knees, "right now, I... I am only happy. I am only happy to be faced with you. I've searched for you for many years so I could beg your forgiveness in person, and now I have the opportunity, finally. And if you can't give me your absolution, if you can't give me salvation, then give me a deed. Give me a deed so I can spend my life righteously, even if hell is where I'm bound for. I want someone else to go to heaven. I want there to be a heaven."

Beside the Sanctian, the other two Guilders looked on in quiet astonishment. But then, the Scaarthian woman shook her head and stared at Cas. "I don't understand."

Avo reached out to her, and streams of fire flowed into her mind. She blinked a few times. "Oh. Oh. Oh," she breathed out. "So this is why." She stared at Avo, at Cas, sounding surprised but also resigned. "I kind of figured it would eventually catch up to me. But this... I didn't... it wasn't even who I was aiming for. I was aiming at you."

Cas felt his gut twist.

She continued. “Yeah, my gun misfired. It went to the side. I was aiming at you through the wall. You, holding a guitar like you are now. Guess the poor half-strand I hit was your father.”

Cas could feel the wetness painting his face, the sound of his father's skull cracking apart as a genetically accelerated projectile pierced through the man. He could feel the wet, even without it being on his face. He could always feel the wet, if he just thought, if he just focused long enough, hard enough.

But the Scaarthian just shrugged. "So, what's this gonna be? Uh, torture? Kill?" She looked at the others around her, and then she frowned. "What is this anyway? I... I'm still lost. If you're not gonna kill me, send me back to my unit. I'm not leaving them to those flesh-shifting Sang fucks."

"Canduir," the last of the group spoke. It was the Guilder pretending to be a wretch. He stared directly at Cas, his inhuman eyes gleaming. "I remember now. I remember your mother. It was before my current specification. I... I saw her through the eyes of my drone. I flew it into her and detonated it. I still remember... I still remember," the man trailed off. "I never knew her name, but she was casting something, to someone, and she had a detonator. We weren't sure what it was going to do, and I received my orders."

The wretched-looking Guilder spoke in such a dreamlike tone that Cas nearly felt himself sink deep into a trance.

But he finally broke out. "And... and the rest of you?" he finally said. There was a lump in his throat, but he forced it down. "What the hell are the rest of you here for?"

Most of them muttered in confusion. Some, however, looked straight at him. Some knew. Those who knew reacted in different ways. Some of them begged, asking for their lives, declaring that they had children. They begged Avo more than they begged him, but Avo never looked at them.

He only had eyes for Cas, watching the man, waiting to see what the cult leader might do.

Some of the other Guilders simply looked on impassively, a hollow expression on their face. They didn't care. Death could come for them, death could avoid them; it was all the same.

"You said all of them," Avo spoke finally. "I brought you everyone associated, everyone still alive, that was connected to your family's demise. It wasn't just one person. Everyone here had a hand in some way. These at the front are the direct killers. The ones in the back? The ones who gave the orders. The ones who betrayed. The ones who informed. It is not a singular sin. It is not a singular act. So, what shape shall your retribution present itself?"

Avo asked the question so casually, so calmly, it almost offended Cas. But that just reminded him what Avo was. A twisted effigy of God or Hell. A fallen angel or an amnesiac angel sent to deliver this world from its place of ruin. Or perhaps a demon unleashed to punish them for their avarice, for their depravity.

Even now, Cas wasn't sure what. And it was the cruelest thing Avo could have done. And also the best thing he could have done, as he laid this gift, this burden, in Cas's hands. Everyone who ever hurt his family, everyone who made him alone, gathered here, right before him, for judgment.

The Sanctian held his Bible high. He gestured out, reaching for Cas, tears flowing down his face. "Whatever you say, I will accept. You are the preacher. I am a member of your flock. I was a wolf once, but I see, I realize I lost the way. Say... say what you will. There is nothing wrong you can say to me. Nothing wrong after all I have done."

Cas shook his head. "What the fuck is this, Avo? Are you trying to teach me something?"

"No," Avo responded immediately. "No, you're thinking of some kind of revenge lesson, but there is no lesson. There is only experience, and a different experience at that. So many things you give moral attributions to, but where is morality? Where does it reside? What is its color? What is its shape? And who decides its existence, its definition? Now, functionally, you... I am only interested. I was never truly moral. But I want to know. I want to know what you will do now, given the opportunity, given the power. I have bestowed you with choice, and it comes at their consequence. You are the one bearing the flaming sword, the Godclad known as the Michael."

Cas shook his head. "Michael's not a Godclad, he's an angel," he breathed. "And it's blasphemy to compare oneself to an angel."

"But we live in dark times," Avo continued. "We live in sunken times. And so, in his absence, I fear that you must bear the sword. Or I congratulate you for bearing the sword. What is the right thing Cas can do?"

"I want to know as well," Avo asked. "I, too, am lost. Guide me."