As Evangeline interfaced with the ship and piloted the Gotengo through the familiar cybernetic pathways of the Big Ghetti Star system, as the vessel had become like an extension of herself, she would find that Ochazuke was not far.
Decks below, past the self-healing storage chambers, the recovery tanks hastily emptied only hours ago, beyond the stowaways of Sasheem's Snake School among both the living and the dead, the martial apostate sought solitude for his task in the heart of the ship where the Wave Motion Engine that conducted its movements through the Super Katchin alloyed Superstructure.
Jinzi's design...like somatic nerves carrying impulses...
There in the silent, insulated chamber, the helm of the Zero System in hand, he donned the man-machine interface and took a seat, whereupon the mechanical filaments of the great machine set themselves up to synchronize with his thoughts; and once his meditation field carried through ki swept up into the system, synchronized his energies with the Gotengo's computer and the pilot on the bridge.
Set in the midst of his thoughts, his sense-awareness expanded through the familiar contours of the ship, and coursing through the energy matrix that carried its passage, its instruments, its intentions, every living presence aboard was palpable.
This will be the font by which we carry the Heka Flow of the Known Universe.
But to carry the hope of another is to shed the ego and become changed. Multiplied by the scores of those that lived yet to resist to say nothing of those who'd fallen into memory, there came the very real threat of losing sanity, the very sense of self, upon this nascent Cosmic Awareness, for though he had roused a focal point for the axis, it was a precarious balance to not be swept away by them.
If this was indeed to glimpse the vision that had been gifted to Asha'rah when she had created the universe, Ochazuke could only seize, enraptured not only by the spectacle that now fell through his very being, but arrested his soul with the sheer enormity of the cosmic expanse. Even with the support of a quintillion souls, it was not a matter of seizing their will to control.
He was only one man among the multitude, and though he had come far, to empty the ego and become one with all things, even for an instant, required an extraordinary strength of will.
Focus...I must focus...and remain but a fixed point...
The disparate clash of emotion struck at him first. The death, the pain, and the fear left in its wake. Tracing the path, he found a yawning anger rising from the emptiness of those sundered worlds, and with it a quiet hope to which he gradually reached out to upon his metaphysical grasp.
The illumination fell. It came first in fleeting moments, as if in the celestial darkness the cracks reflected for a phantom instant across the sky. It stirred in him memories of the ocean about Tanchozurujima, where training had carried deep into the night, and the plasma streaks struck fire over the black salt water. Now, upon the echoes of the departed voices of those who had declared for them, he began to trace a path from the edges of the faultlines.
The path of Sakin's devastation...
Why, then, should his thoughts return to dead Jormungandr? The traces of possibility that beat in the heart of Eternal Dragons was of a nature crafted from balanced Creation and Destruction.
Efrideet..
The Oni that Was remained near to his thoughts, and so did his declaration to the Goddess unchained. Slowly, the Heka Axis began to shift as Ochazuke channeled it towards the Gotengo, and the surge of energy carried upon his
Battle Meditation began to move with them as they ascended.
Seated at the heart of the machine did Ochazuke glimpse across the Cosmic Leyline, and sought there a vision of the heart of the universe. By the day's start the Clarion Call echoed, and now he sought to traced the path of its ruin, the source of this latest chaos back from where it had come from.
Its echoes there at Galactic Centre, and the path to the Forsworn World...