Aiser'lis dodges, and strikes out. Shae is amazingly good, for a civilian, but Aiser'lis is unquestionably better. She blocks Shae's blows, their limbs colliding with the distinctive almost musical shing of colliding exemplar flash states. Her own blows land, knocking Shae back, overcoming Shae's physical power to keep her on the defensive with sheer skill.

Glass shatters and Cera'mae comes hurtling onto the field. She races to join the fight, but her steps are unsteady, her breath broken by a moan as she staggers and catches the small ball of plant matter that she squeezes out of her vagina. She hurls it overhand at Shae's back.

Shae doesn't know what the projectile does, but she doesn't care. She catches it. And slams it into her opponent's face.

It explodes into a cloud of glowing reddish spores, which flash over the instant they touch anything. A fiery explosion engulfs the Knight's upper half. The force and heat of the explosion drains the last glints from her Exemplar Harness as she dives in and seizes the Knight's arm, and with the last of her artificial flash state, Shae rips the Knight's arm off at the shoulder.

She was inadvertently holding back an orgasm this whole time, and she feels her Exemplar Harness stop stimulating her as the power leaves her limbs. It's now or never. She ignores the blood and slams her hand against her crotch, grinding the inert nubs into her vulva. And she cums.

The Exemplar Harness reactivates with not even an instant to spare. A second sporebomb bursts against Shae's back, covering her in exploding flamespores. Cera'mae staggers to a stop with a moan as she births a third.

Aiser'lis recovers fast, vines already growing from the stump of her shoulder to replace her arm. Her eyes take on a manic gleam from the pain. She's lost limbs before, but not often. She has to take a moment to gather herself before she can resume the fight.

Shae doesn't give her a moment.

Aiser'lis hits the ground. Shae follows her, slamming down with all her weight on the point of two fingers. It's enough to cave in the Knight's ribs, and Shae pushes through, using her momentum to bury her hand in the Knight's body.

Shae grabs the Knight's beating heart, pins the woman to the ground with her foot, and rips it out. Let's see her Empyreal Blossom heal that.

It tries. It fails.

The luminous white glow of the Scintillant begins to gather around Aiser'lis.

Cera'mae is backing up, holding her third sporebomb ready to throw. The airship crew is watching in horror. The pulsebinder's surviving team is cowering behind their equipment.

Shae lifts her gaze to Cera'mae, and smirks.

Status

This core's awakener is currently linked.

This core has TWO command links and TEN feeder links.

This core has TWO blocks of linked territory and FOURTEEN subordinate units.

704 of 9,998 storage circuits are charged, and power draw is currently 0.48 glints per measure.

Heatless daylight spills into the glass-tiled prison through a crystalline ceiling, slanting with the Ebb. The covering stone slab is gone, and the square room housing the Origin Core is now a rectangle divided into two perfect cubes separated by a transparent wall with only a row of small circular openings at waist height.

The original room still houses the Origin Core itself, along with one Phallic Tentacle and a nude Meron'shae. Two dormant Empyreal Blossoms sit innocently in the corner.

The new room contains eleven bruised, naked young men, shackled by wrist and ankle to the walls with glassy restraints provided by the Origin Core's furnishing abilities, and a Yonic Tentacle for each of them, hard at work. Each young man groans and whimpers in strained pleasure as a slick fleshy throat milks his cock, pumping itself up and down each shaft with variously delicate strokes. Several of them are spent, barely staying hard as the Yonic Tentacles assigned to them struggle to arouse them, while a few others are still responding enough to be good for another orgasm.

Four men on the back wall, three on each of the side walls, and one more shackled to the dividing wall. Unlike the others, he is shackled facing the wall, his swollen erection sticking through one of the holes into the Core room. Unlike the others, he is very thoroughly gagged and blindfolded by a face-covering mask, glossy black on the outside, fleshy pink on the inside, with pink tendrils escaping the edges of the mask to loop around his neck. Because unlike the others, he is able to give commands to the Origin Core.

Because whoever has the most empulse in the Core is given Command status, regardless of her wishes. She won the fight, only to almost lose everything when the man she threw to the first Yonic Tentacle had an orgasm and the Origin Core suddenly started obeying him.

It was close, but she avoided disaster. Both of the Knights are dead. Now she has to make sure she feeds the Core more than any of her prisoners do, or she risks losing control of it.

Shae cums again, moaning as the Phallic Tentacle wrapped around her legs fucks her deep and hard. A soft glassy pad supports her body as she lays beneath the Origin Core with her legs raised, feet resting against the smooth surface on the bottom of the glassy sphere.

Her kindling empulse flows out of her, transmitted through the Phallic Tentacle into the Origin Core.

Shae already surpassed her unfortunate first prisoner in empulse contribution. She can't demote him directly, but if all the empulse he contributed gets used, he loses his link with the Origin Core and his command status with it. Only the awakener is remembered between links.

Unfortunately, the Origin Core does its best to draw power evenly from all of its linked storage, so Shae can't just spend her first prisoner's empulse before everyone else's.

Shae has other ideas about what to do with him.

Shae orders all of the tentacles to slither away to rest and give her prisoners a break. The Phallic Tentacle withdraws its firm girth from her cunt and releases her legs, slithering off to coil up and wait. She gets up and goes to the dividing wall, placing her hands on either side of the shackled young man.

"Change this wall to have a vertical gap at the width of my touch."

The other prisoners go slack, too exhausted and spent to do more than watch blearily.

With a mild spike in power draw, colors deepen around the channels of light running through the transparent wall. The glassy material ripples, before eroding away to leave the shackled young man hanging in a new archway. The wall settles down into its new configuration.

The shackled and masked young man twists uncertainly at this new development. His swollen erection begins to wilt.

Can't have that.

Shae presses her nude body against him, catching his cock at the apex of her thighs. He jolts, shivering at her touch while his long neglected erection glides along Shae's wet, silky cleft. He throbs, hardening even as he tries to pull away. Shae hitches one leg around his hip and feeds his rigid shaft into her cunt. She rolls her hips, slowly stroking him with her slick inner walls until he whimpers with his need to cum. She stops moving.

"You should know none of this is your fault," she says to the young man. "I am sorry I didn't have the means to be more selective about what comes next."

Shae backs off, letting his cock slide out of her as she puts her leg down.

"Detach the shackles binding this man."

The glassy mounts luminesce and shimmer as they pinch off and retreat into the ceiling and floor.

The young man's wrists remain bound together, his ankles likewise. He teeters, unable to keep his balance so bound with his senses so impeded.

Shae catches him from behind and drags him over to the pad beneath the Origin Core. He tries to struggle against her, but he's disoriented, exhausted, and painfully aroused. He doesn't try all that hard.

"Attach the shackles on this man to the floor."

She stretches him across the pad, wrestling his arms down over his head off one side while his ankle shackles fuse to the floor off the other side. Once she has him secured, she sits up on him with a sigh. His hard cock throbs against her butt.

Shae reaches up and touches the Origin Core, peering into it. Matrix Storage.

Whirling luminous whorls.

Matrix Storage

Empty storage circuits may be temporarily repurposed to contain a viable pulse matrix in transubstantial pattern suspension at the standard conversion ratio of mass-empulse saturation.

Matrix Storage does not allow nested circuit charge and any excess empulse will be diverted into adjacent storage circuits.

A suspended pulse matrix may be reinstantiated at no cost, or at a cost equivalent to any volitional empulse dissemination within its capacity.

2 storage circuits are currently assigned to a suspended pulse matrix.

Deep sparkling glimmers.

It all comes down to this. Shae's entire plan hinges on what happens next. All of her effort and many of her crimes will be for nothing if she fails to complete this last critical piece of her masterwork.

Shae reaches for her jacket, leaning across her bound victim's naked body, and pulls a scroll out of one pocket. She unrolls it, checking what's she's written there one last time.

From a second pocket, she retrieves another hard-won prize: three vivid green spheres that fit in the palm of her hand. Enough vital aetherlight to infuse her for thirty beats.

"Just so you know," she says to her victim as she lifts herself to bring her vulva to the tip of his swollen cock before she sinks down, impaling herself slowly, "what I'm going to do next is very delicate. If I mess up, if you distract me, the results may be excessively gruesome. For you. That is not a threat. If I make a mistake, I do not know what could happen, but I promise you it'll be worse than anything I'm going to do to you on purpose."

This is a lie, but Shae shoves down her guilt when the bound young man nods nervously.

To the Origin Core, "Parse as Literal Instruction: Let one hundred and twenty-eight conjoined empty storage circuits be the scope of the following matrix substantiation."

And then Shae reads her program from the scroll, carefully, going line by line and phrasing each with utter precision. It takes a while. There is a lot of writing crammed onto that scroll.

The bound young man doesn't understand any of what she's saying to the Origin Core. If he did, he might try to stop her, gruesome fate or no gruesome fate. But lacking the knowledge to follow the scary girl's logic, he lets her finish without interruption.

The whorls of light all stop, locking in place.

Awaiting Input

For

New Matrix Template

Shae puts the scroll down and smiles.

The bound young man trembles under her, his hard cock twitching in the grip of her vaginal walls.

Shae... undulates. Slowly. Her hips rise and fall in a teasing churn. The young man whimpers. His hips jerk up to meet her.

"Relax," she says as she fucks him. "This is almost over."

The bound young man can't see her or reply to her, with the fleshy mask attached to his face, but that sounds more than a little ominous. He hopes he's imagining things. He hopes that the scary girl has what she wants already, and is only raping him on a whim. His whole body boils with the need, and her cunt feels so good gliding up and down his cock. At this point he'd be willing to call it more of a mercy-rape than a trespass. He wants to cum. He needs to cum. He really really hopes this isn't still part of some nefarious machination!

If Shae does this right, he'll never know either way. She can see that he's nervous, but he's also riding on the desperate edge of orgasm. Without warning, she rises and slams her hips down, bouncing hard and fast on the young man's cock, dragging him harshly over the point of no return.

Shae brings the green aetherlight spheres up in front of her face, and crushes them in her hand. The brilliant vapor flows out between her fingers, shining brightly. Shae breathes in, drawing the vital aetherlight into her body. It's slippery, leaking out of her skin at a rapid pace, but it'll last long enough to do what needs to be done.

With a muffled cry, the young man ejaculates.

And at the first spurt, Shae yanks herself off, standing, even as she hits him with the strongest vitalbloom she can muster.

Contrary to popular myth, the vitalbloom is not an overriding aphrodisiac that can force anyone into the throes of lust at any time. It is a blunt instrument that cannot be aimed like that. A vitalbloom is energy, wakefulness, arousal, but it multiplies what is already there. Using it on a terrified foe will result in far more in the way of manic adrenalized violence than sexual responsiveness.

But for a victim in the throes of an artfully cultivated ruined orgasm, it burns out all desire beyond a desperately urgent need for sexual attention of any kind. It empties his mind of everything but lust.

Flash state. Bladehand through the throat to sever the spine at the base of the skull.

The young man dies without even feeling the blow that kills him. His thrashing body goes limp, one last rope of semen splashing down on his chest as he falls still. One of the other captive men cries out in protest.

Shae squeezes her eyes shut, steels herself, but doesn't otherwise outwardly react as she goes to wipe the blood off her hand.

Soon, the Scintillant gathers. A luminous white vortex that tightens around the dead young man's head until it is blinding.

At last, it collapses to a searing point, then blasts upwards in a radiant beam of white light, seeking the Celestial Sea beyond the sky.

The beam strikes the Origin Core. This shouldn't matter. Nothing known to science or legend can prevent the Scintillant from reaching the Celestial Sea.

Until now.

The beam splits, spilling around the Origin Core like water before curling inwards to dive into the deepest depths of the crystal sphere. The frozen whorls of glimmering light within stutter and fragment.

Flicker.

Dim.

The last of the Scintillant sucks into the Origin Core, and the Origin Core goes dark.