Katsumi flinched as Enmei's head exploded into a thousand Glass shards. The Warden had described exactly what would happen, but the sight of it was still terrifying and disturbing.
He's not dead. Despite how it looks, Apollyon said he wouldn't die immediately.
After the initial violence of the gunshot, everything around Enmei had slowed. His body, the gun, and the myriad shards of Glass all drifted slowly down, as if caught in molasses. Katsumi's heart broke at the sight of his limp form, caught timeless in the air. No. She couldn't allow emotion of that kind to claim her now.
She forced her mind further away from the experience, wondering instead at the phenomenon before her. Enmei's mind had been broken, and the the breaking of a mind seemed to distort time itself. She wanted to study the floating Glass, to learn its properties.
Half of Enmei's face was still there, his remaining eye staring unconsciously out at her. No use, it was impossible to completely dissociate herself. Katsumi averted her gaze guiltily. "What is next, Holy Warden?"
"The second test is complete. The Candidate Enmei has demonstrated his faith before you. Faith that he would be saved. Now comes the final test. What is the Third Truth?"
"Blessed are those who bear the Will of Divinitas unto death. For by their sacrifice shall their names each be inscribed in the Scrolls of Remembrance, and they shall kneel in worthiness before the Throne of Heaven to be exalted in the Archwarden's arms."
"Prove your understanding, Candidate. Even with his shattered mind, your lover still lives. Bring him salvation, repair his shattered mind with your own. Exalt him in your arms."
"How?"
"I will speak no more. Time is of the essence, Candidate. A shattered mind will not retain its sanity for long."
Think. Emotions cloud the thoughts, so be rid of them. The years spent under her parents' overbearing gaze had made her good at that, but living apart from them had made the practice obsolete. She hadn't needed to force a dissociation in so long. She had all but forgotten how when they were running from the Custodian, but in that situation she hadn't needed to think.
Now, there was no other option. Her dissociation here was more than a coping mechanism – Enmei's survival depended on it.
She exhaled sharply, and forced herself to approach his suspended body. She studied the wound first – whatever the projectile was, it had broken through Enmei's right temple, leaving a glowing, cracking imprint on the outside, but otherwise exerting relatively little force. The majority of force had been dispersed through Enmei's skull and out the other side, leaving the left side of his face and head almost completely destroyed.
Confusingly, there was no blood in sight. Had there even been a projectile at all?
Katsumi studied the Glass fragments next, reaching out to touch one and pricking her finger on its sharp, glowing edge.
Her consciousness wavered, blots appearing on her vision. What the hell?
Katsumi looked down at her finger to see a bead of blood appearing. She sucked it off quickly. Interesting. The Glass appeared physical, but touching it had an effect on the mind. It defied gravity, appeared from thin air – could it even be considered real matter? So much for her advanced exploration of the sciences. She supposed the fundamentals of physics didn't really hold in a world like this.
But logic did. To save Enmei, she needed to understand once and for all how this phenomenon of Glass operated. There were threads, ideas that locked together well enough. Nothing could be made certain, but she had found the answer to the first test largely through intuition alone. The circumstances were dire now, but she could do the same here.
Everything. She had to use all of the knowledge she had about this world to derive a solution.
The mind shatters like glass.
Glass. Shards of consciousness. Mental Glass. Enmei, alive, but a shattered mind will not retain its sanity for long. Katsumi had always been one to support physical explanations of consciousness, emotions as just chemicals in different quantities flowing through the brain, but what if the future had happened upon a different solution?
Had humanity solved the problem of consciousness? It was a captivating thought, and if Apollyon's test was to figure out how to repair Enmei's mind, then that meant the Warden thought it was possible for her to derive the theory of consciousness this world operated on, all in a short period of time.
There was no time for complex analysis or boards full of equations. She had to guess, and build on those guesses until something worked.
Problem one: what was Glass? What was something Katsumi understood that she could apply parallels too? The answer popped into her head almost immediately.
Fire. Something that existed as a temporally bound byproduct of a chemical reaction. Katsumi thought back to when Aspentas had given her that sword Kelshra. Aspentas had willed it into existence, and it had coalesced from Glass. When Katsumi had told the weapon to hide, it burst into Glass and disappeared. If the Glass acted similarly as a temporally bound substance like plasma was for fire, then the Glass itself wasn't what she should be focusing on.
It was as good a lead as she could find. She had to keep going with it.
Assuming Glass was a manifestation of some kind of reaction, then she already had a solid idea of what powered that reaction. She had used it to convey emotions, and to fly. When she and Enmei had connected their minds outside the cathedral, Glass had appeared between their hands. Katsumi's mind raced ahead.
Problem two: the device in their necks, the Amorphium Cortex. It had allowed them to do things scientifically impossible within the Warden's domain. Aspentas had called his domain his imagination. Taking that literally, that meant that now they were in Apollyon's mind. Aspentas called himself a 'fledgling god,' and while Katsumi still wasn't sure what that term really meant, the mechanoid had demonstrated many of the same mind-boggling abilities that Apollyon had.
Aspentas had somehow handed them over into the mind of another god, and it seemed like whatever mind they were in, that god was able to determine the rules of reality, regardless of what classical physics said about it.
A theory began to form in Katsumi's mind, one that was eerily probable given what information she had gained.
Somewhere along the line, humanity had discovered a consciousness fundamentally different from that of any living creature on Earth. While human consciousness could only create an imperfect dream world within itself, this new consciousness could create something concrete. It imagined a reality that it could shape for itself, like a god holding an entire planet within its mind.
It seemed ridiculous, but Katsumi's heart began to pound with childish excitement. She was getting somewhere. The picture was far from complete, but if this 'Amorphium' operated by that fundamental concept, then all of the ideas she needed sprung out from there.
What if Katsumi and the two gods weren't so different after all? What if the Amorphic cortex in her neck contained the same godly consciousness by which the two beings operated? The cortex was what made her a fledgling god alongside Aspentas. Alongside the Warden Apollyon as well?
She looked up at the Warden, remembering something from their flight from the Custodian. "Holy Warden, I know you said you would speak no more, but may you at least answer me this – what does CTP stand for?"
Matchlight's team had used that term, saying it multiple times as they calculated their dimensional journey away from the Custodian. But what if the 'dimensions' they had been referring to weren't dimensions as Katsumi understood them, but . . .
"As you are making good progress, I will assist you in confirming your thoughts. CTP is a common phrase amongst Candidates, referring to a calculated 'cognitive targeting position,' denoting movement from one region of the Overseen to another. Cognitive position is the coordinate by which we measure the distance between the mental domains of different gods."
With that, the world fell into place around her. She couldn't be sure of the specifics, but the framework made sense. Each of the 'dimensions' they had traveled through, each domain they had entered up until now – they were all the minds of different godlike beings.
"The Overseen is the Archwarden's mind. Within it are the minds of the Wardens, within them the Candidates. Layers and layers, a tower of consciousness. "
The Warden's omnipresent laughter boomed through Katsumi, around her, around the Warden's mind.
"Not many Candidates can claim such a complete understanding of the Overseen so early on. You surprise me. Congratulate yourself for this accomplishment, Candidate, but the test is not yet over. In truth I never expected you to get this far, let alone succeed. But since you have, I will assist you with a reminder: the Archwarden, Wardens, Seraphim and all the others are not the only gods of the Overseen."
"Of course," Katsumi said, "Up until now I wasn't able to grasp what being a god really meant, but if we share the same inhuman power . . ."
She looked at the gun still clutched in Enmei's fingers.
"Warden, what is the cognitive position of your mind?"
"10.000."
Katsumi had seen the numbers printed on the display of Enmei's gun before he fired. They had been the same. Now they read something different: 11.023.
"The Archwarden dreams the Wardens, the Wardens dream the Candidates, but not even the Candidates remain human. If we're gods ourselves, that means we have domains as well. Is 11.023 the cognitive position of Enmei's mind?"
"Correct. Everyone is given a share of the Archwarden's mind, Candidate. You must simply learn to control it."
"Then answer me this, Holy Warden. From what I've seen, control over one's own mind doesn't seem like the only thing this Amorphium cortex is capable of. Can it influence the minds of others as well?"
"You already know the answer to that."
Enmei's mind was broken into shards of consciousness, but through Amorphium cortex that consciousness could be controlled. Katsumi understood, or at least she thought she did. There was still so much that made so little sense, but her intuition was all that mattered now.
She walked up to his floating form, which had begun to slowly fall to the side. With some effort, she tore the gun from his rigid grip, cast it aside, and guided his body so it laid against hers. She laced her fingers through his palms, connecting the outlets.
Through the cords that ran through the bones of her arms, up along her spine, and finally looped into that device in her neck, Katsumi funneled more than just emotion into Enmei's mind.
She flowed into him with her consciousness itself.