As consciousness returned to Telin, he swiftly noticed that everything was wrong. He was completely unable to move anything apart from his eyes and mouth, he was secured to an operating table in a room lined with plastic and there was a Decay Lord standing on his chest. Granted, the Decay Lord in question was only a meter tall, but it was still there, still standing on the mighty Shadow of the Great Blades.
“Hi!” the tiny Decay Lord clicked. They seemed oddly cheerful but lacked facial expressions.
“Which one of Spiritpurger are you, so I can report you to whichever one of you is your leader and have all six of your stupid, mechanical skulls crushed?”
The Decay Lord clicked again. “I’m Shieldamp. Formerly Spiritpurger-1. I’m also informally the leader of our team. But you can call me Cleanser Kal Wehl-Tah, Tah for short. How are you feeling today, Telin? Can I call you that or do I have to call you Voidblade?”
Telin snarled. “No. You call me Voidblade. As you are an underling. And I will call you Spiritpurger.”
“I just told you I have a new codename now!” Tah’s clicking was annoying. “If you’re not going to respect my name, we’re not going to respect yours.”
“What do you mean, we?”
Telin felt something sticky connect to the side of his head. He then felt some more sticky things. Before he knew it, his head was covered in what appeared to be small sensors, all of which were connected to tiny little wires and were feeding into a device being held to one of the other members of Spiritpurger.
“Oh. You are all here. Which one of Spiritpurger are you, white robot?”
“I’m Cleanser Kal Wehl-Koh, codename Sonicshock. Koh for short. And we’re not all here. The only other one of us present is Nuh, codename Gravitybash. He’s busy making sure you don’t move at all.”
“Where are the rest of you?”
“In quarantine, alongside every other person with telepathy on this ship!” Koh started to explain. “Your powers are vampiric. You mostly just borrow physical strength from your fellow Decay Lords, but you also borrow telepathic powers from Soulblade as well. Whatever’s wrong with you, we think it’s infectious.”
Telin blinked. “Infectious?”
Koh nodded. “Infectious. Also, apologies for having Tah stand on you. It’s a requirement though.”
The white Cleanser fell silent and started to tap away at various nearby consoles. Telin tried to have a look around and see if anyone else was present, but he couldn’t even see the third of the three robots present.
“Why does this Spiritpurger… uh… why does Shieldamp have to stand on me?”
“Because of our Theocydes Protocol…” all three Cleaners answered in unison, before falling silent again, not offering any further information.
Koh went back to his consoles, but as he worked, Telin could tell something was wrong. The little robot was making clicking sounds, and the annoying one standing on Telin’s chest kept on glancing over to them. Or rather, it seemed to be. Telin couldn’t really work out how these beings work, they were completely mechanical but also somehow seemed to have emotions. The clicking paused, and Koh started placing more sensors on Telin, most notably on his chest, before returning to his scanners.
Again, Telin scanned his surroundings. The fact that Spiritpurger were working on him specifically was both a good thing and a bad thing. It was definitely a bad thing because it meant something was horribly wrong with Telin, and this was made worse because Telin didn’t know what was wrong with him and couldn’t remember how he had ended up in this situation. At least he was in good hands. Spiritpurger had done a lot of work for the lower members of the Phantai, they knew what they were doing, right?
“Nuh, can you have a look at this please?”
“Do you want me to-”
“No, Tah, definitely stay where you are…” Koh showed a screen to Nuh, who responded by poking the screen and repeatedly dimming and lighting up his eyes. “I’m not seeing things, am I?”
“Uh, no, you’re not seeing things. That is definitely…”
“Definitely what?” Telin interrupted. “Is something wrong?”
Nuh took the screen and brought it over so Tah could see it where he was standing. Tah also did the repeated dimming light up eye thing.
“Okay so he can’t hear this…” Koh started speaking, but the volume of his voice abruptly disappeared, turning into a series of clicks. Nuh and Tah also started clicking. Clearly they were communicating in a way that Telin couldn’t understand them. After a little too long, Tah started pacing across Voidblade’s chest, then paused and turned to Telin.
“What is going on?”
“Um, you have a portal inside your body…” Despite how monotonous and mechanical Tah’s voice was, he sounded concerned. “From what we can tell, there is definitely some latent Voidborn manipulation in your head, and it IS telling you to kill everyone you care about in traditional Voidborn fashion. But at the same time, it seems that some other Voidborn that we don’t know about is hijacking those mental manipulations, subconsciously trying to force you to use your shadow powers to create a portal for a Voidborn army to come through. Except since whoever is doing this can’t control you completely, the portal is kinda just sitting in your chest.”
Telin took a moment to digest what these stupid robots were saying to him. No. They weren’t stupid. They were small and weak but they were trying to help. Actually, they weren’t even weak. The black robot was keeping Telin firmly in place. Eventually, Telin sighed and relented. This was clearly bad. He needed help. He felt weak, he felt wrong, needing this help, but he couldn’t put the Phantai and his fellow Great Blades at risk because of his own pride.
“So how do we fix this?” Telin asked.
“Well…” Tah hesitated. “We have a potential solution, but we kinda need to ask a few questions first. Also we need to wake the others up and grab one of your medics. And Koh has to physically leave the room to do so because we can’t use our telepathy.”
Koh lowered his head slightly, handed Nuh a small tablet, then silently left the room. The other two Cleansers didn’t say anything. Not enjoying this long, awkward silence, Telin decided to ask a question.
“What is the Theocydes Protocol?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Why not?”
Nuh glanced at Tah, then tutted. “It’s a safety measure you can’t know about. All we can say is that it’s named after the Voidborn that the protocol was first used on.”
“And who was this Voidborn?”
Again, Nuh glanced at Tah. Tah shrugged, then answered the question. “We don’t know the details, only met them once. But they were a Goldblessed Voidborn that operated solo and had insane regeneration skills. That’s all we can tell you.”
Eventually, Koh returned, bringing the other three Cleansers and one other being with them. The being that wasn’t a member of Spiritpurger was Mediblade, the Phantai doctor who personally served the Three Great Blades. Mediblade was a very skinny Beh’evok, although still tall and heavily armoured. However, they lacked the traditional crown of horns on their head, and the armour plating on their arms was much sleeker, covered up by a long pair of latex gloves. Mediblade also wore a disposable mask that covered their mouth and nostrils. The Cleansers had never bothered, mostly because none of them ever needed to breathe, and, being mostly made of metal, they could keep themselves clean with just basic antiviral washes.
“Just so you know who these three are, this is Leh, Vacuumblast, Pah, Plasmaburn and Gah, Magnetar…” Koh introduced his siblings. “Leh is our resident biology guy. Pah and Gah are normally in charge of corruption and Voidborn parasite removal, but Gah will be helping Nuh keep you steady, while Pah has the unfortunate job of cutting away your armour.”
Telin blinked, not at all liking what he had just heard. He found it somewhat odd that Tah had climbed off his body, but his tiny, metallic claws were now firmly wrapped around Telin’s right wrist. Clearly they were serious about surgery. “You do realise a lot of my armour is both natural plating and is attached to my body, yes?”
“Of course. We’ve operated on plenty of your kind before. Mostly Kenic Spore removals. This is a bit more… extreme, which is why we brought Mediblade in. We can’t completely anaesthetize you, but Mediblade knows the proper doses to completely numb your pain sensors, and he also better knows than we do what internal organs you don’t need.”
“WHAT?” Telin desperately tried to move, but nothing happened. His body remained perfectly still.
“Sorry, that portal is getting bigger, we need to move now, before it starts killing you and before things start coming out of it.”
The Cleansers didn’t repeat themselves, and abruptly all started clicking at each other. Without a word, Pah climbed onto Telin’s chest and tapped his right palm. Two rectangular blades popped out from a shield-like weapon on Pah’s wrist, and the blades swiftly began to heat up. Telin felt a needle pierce into his neck, and several more were stabbed into the small gaps in his chest armour. Gah used his magnetic powers to remove any non-natural armour, while Pah started slicing into Telin’s organic plating, revealing raw flesh underneath.
With a click, Pah retracted the blades on his right hand and extended an identical set of blades on his left hand, which he used to much more cleanly cut into Telin’s chest cavity. Telin weirdly felt nothing as flesh and muscle were cut apart and folded to one side, his ribcage was broken and bones were carefully moved out of the way by Gah, until black blood and organs could be seen. Being a divine creature, a former deity, a Decay Lord, Telin didn’t really need most of his organs aside from his heart, but he had never gotten around to getting rid of them. However, there was a weird, unnatural glow inside his body.
A golden portal could be seen, hovering over his heart, lungs and redundant digestive organs. And out of that portal, something started to emerge.
Immediately, Telin felt the gravitational weights holding his body down dissipate. Pah clambered off Telin’s body, Gah pulled Leh and Mediblade away from Telin and Koh ripped off all the small, sticky sensors. However, the grip Tah had around Telin’s wrist tightened.
Before Telin could ask what was going on, everything turned black. The room was gone. Everything was gone. He was floating in a dark, empty nothingness. The only other thing present was the red Cleanser, who was had just let go of his wrist.
With a snarl, Telin grabbed hold of the little robot and ripped their stupid, oversized head off their body.
“WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?” Telin shouted into the darkness, ignoring the blood leaking from the gaping hole in his chest. “YOU LITTLE MONSTER!”
To Telin’s surprise, the robot responded.
“Well, the idea was to teleport you into the safety of the periuniversal void so that an army of Voidborn monsters didn’t suddenly erupt from your body, in the middle of the Phantai’s headquarters. But somehow they acted faster than we could react and they, uh, disconnected the portal from your body before I could completely teleport you away.”
Telin held Tah’s head. Only one large, crystalline eye was lit up.
“So you are saying that there is now a Voidborn army with a portal inside my beloved ship?”
Tah’s voice crackled. “Unfortunately, probably.”
“And we are trapped out here? Teleport me back, right now!”
“I can’t. You just ripped my head off. I need the majority of my body to be able to teleport more than just my Krana-brain. And, in your current state, there’s nothing stopping you from instantly being mind-controlled the moment you return, forcing you to just fight alongside any Voidborns present.”
Telin closed his eyes and took a long, drawn out breath. His chest felt awfully cold, even as his body started slowly healing itself up, his blood crystallizing into new flesh and muscle.
“So what do we do, little one?”
Tah clicked again, before falling silent, his eyes going dim. After about ten seconds, his eyes lit up once more.
“I have an idea, but you’re really, really not going to like it…”