Chapter 1040: Doing That in Anger (Patreon)

On a snow-swept mountaintop, Jason sat cross-legged, eyes closed as he floated just above the ground. The peak was shrouded in cloud cover, visibility stopping little more than arm’s reach away. The washed-out light of pre-dawn made everything seem grey and white, icy fog swirling around in bleak desolation.

The only point of colour was a glowing wire frame in the shape of a deformed humanoid. The lines of magic making it up shifted in pulses of colour, like a vascular system made of rainbows. Slowly, the whole construct sagged to the side, collapsing to the ground and disappearing in an explosion of sparks. Jason sighed and unfurled his legs to stand in the knee-deep snow.

“You know I’ll be crafting avatars in my astral kingdom, right?” he asked. “There I can remake reality nice and easy. Doing it with my aura’s crude reality-manipulation is like trying to stack a house of cards using hand grenades.”

He looked around, seeing nothing but the cloud shrouding the mountain.

“I know you can hear me,” he called out.

Raythe emerged from the clouds, floating in the air above the rocks.

“You didn’t know, you assumed. If your avatar was better, then you would have known. On the topic of your astral kingdom, I remind you that you do not currently have access to it. As for making the task nice and easy, our purpose here is to make you better. Would you rather take the easy way?”

“Yes! I would like that very much, please.”

Raythe rolled her eyes.

“Learning to craft an avatar with woefully inadequate tools will improve your skill. Teach you to avoid inefficiencies and waste in the process. To find the simple methods that yield the same results as the complex ones.”

“I think ‘woefully’ might be a bit harsh,” he muttered, then stretched out his arms. “I’m taking a break. It’s past time you told me how things are going on Earth.”

“Giving your attention to matters on which you can have no effect will only serve to distract you.”

“I don’t care. I want to hear it, and I know you can tell me. That isn’t an assumption.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Yes.”

“Is that, ‘no, it actually is an assumption,’ or ‘no, I won’t tell you?’”

“Yes.”

“To which?”

“Both.”

“That’s not what I wanted to hear.”

“No.”

“Are you flirting with me?”

“No.”

“Okay. I didn’t think so, but I had to check. Due diligence, you know?”

“No.”

Jason chuckled, then brushed off some snow that had settled on the shoulders of his tropical shirt.

“Okay, we’re done,” Jason said, and started trudging down the mountain, feet carving channels in the snow as he waded over the unseen rocky ground beneath that quickly turned into a slope.

“This lesson is not over,” Raythe said.

He stopped and turned to face her, half occluded by icy fog.

“All the lessons are over, Raythe. I know that I need to learn how to make avatars properly, and why. What I don’t know is why you need me to.”

“I am helping you as best I can, as I promised. We had an agreement.”

“Yeah, but there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? I’m getting a distinct ‘for his own good’ feeling from what’s happening here. Not just you, but me being in this place. People keeping things from me all these years. I thought it was done when I learned about Knowledge, but I can feel myself still dancing on other people’s strings. You, Dawn, the Reaper. Knowledge was stringing me along for years, and you knew. I get it, you had your own concerns. But I’m tired of it, and you want me to be, because the alternative is angry. I’m on the verge of diamond-rank, where I announce to the cosmos what I am. You don’t want me doing that in anger.”

“No,” Raythe acknowledged softly. “We do not.”

“Then what do you want? Because it’s more than just fixing this afterlife. It’s been a mess for billions of years; it could have waited until the Earth wasn’t under invasion for me to clean it up.”

“You’re right. This place is a crucible. We want you to be stronger.”

“That’s not all of it. What aren’t you telling me?”

“The things we can’t because you have to walk your own path, not the one we set out for you. We want you to make certain choices, but they have to be yours. All we can do is put the choices in front of you and hope you choose correctly.”

“And who decides what’s correct? You?”

“Yes. You and I are beings of near-ultimate power and authority. We are the ones who have to take responsibility. I know you understand that.”

“I mentioned before that you had your own concerns.”

“Yes.”

“What about my concerns? My friends. My family. My planet. Why is it that your concerns are the one I have to sacrifice mine for?”

“Because the cosmos can afford to lose them. It’s an unkind metric, but that is the scale on which we operate.”

“That’s how an immortal thinks.”

“We are immortals.”

“That’s the thing, though isn’t it? You can tell me what I am, but the truth is, that’s still in flux. The whole point of diamond-rank is becoming what I will be. I decide the kind of immortal I am, and I’m the kind who doesn’t think like that, even when the cosmos tells him he should. Who doesn’t see a mortal life as inconsequential. Collateral damage. Tell me how things are going on Earth, Raythe, or leave this place and don’t come back.”

Gold light shone from within Jason’s body before strobing and then cutting out entirely. In its place came silvery-white light, filled with a sea of sparkling motes of diamond.

Ability [Castigate] has reached Gold 9 (100%).

Ability [Castigate] has reached Diamond 0 (100%).

As the light faded, Jason stared accusation at Raythe.

“You’re doing this on purpose. Provoking me into little speeches so I monologue my way into another diamond-rank power. Well, we’re done with that. You’re the one who always talks about me setting out my own path, and I’m not going to let you keep — oh, bloody hell.”

Ability [Feast of Absolution] has reached Gold 9 (100%).

Ability [Feast of Absolution] has reached Diamond 0 (100%).

“Just to be clear,” Jason said, “those abilities were really close to ranking up before you got here.”

***

On a lower slope, well below the cloud line, Jason and Raythe sat of a jutting rock, looking out at a sprawling city on the plains below. It was the next one Jason would purge of the curse, and the largest to date. Once the sun had nudged further over the horizon to diminish the power of any vampiric ambushes, he would move out.

“I still say this is an unnecessary distraction,” Raythe said.

“And I’m telling you it is a very necessary distraction, because I’m done with avatar lessons if you don’t let me know how things are going on Earth. Until you do, I’m not going back to the build-a-Jason workshop.”

She glanced over at him, them back out at the panorama as morning lights washed over the plains.

“Very well. Roughly a year after the initial invasion, an operation by the Earth forces at the dimensional anchor point cost Knowledge a significant number of personnel and control of the location, at least for a time. It forced her army to become more circumspect in their approach, moving from aggressive territory grabs to a more methodical approach of slow consolidation. They have, to date, been primarily pushing into Asia and Africa. In Asia they face the Earth’s more conventional forces. Essence users and the enhanced with their exosuit armour. The Earth forces have done very well, given that there is a notable disparity in raw power. Large group tactics, innovative use of magitech. Especially in the ways it has facilitated practical applications of combat rituals.”

“And Africa? That’s Cabal-controlled.”

“Yes. The invaders have been having trouble with the less-conventional forces of the Cabal. Their mysterious nature has been hard to handle for Knowledge’s army, who are used to having superior information. The Unorthodoxy messengers under Boris Ket Lundi have also been operating in full force. As a result, while Asia is seeing slow but steady gains for the invaders, Africa is proving more of a problem.”

“That’s good. It’s what we worked years to prepare for.”

“Yes, but the tyranny of rank always wins in the end. Knowledge has more gold-rankers, and her silver-rankers are trained essence users. The soldiers of Earth fight with unity and strategy that Knowledge’s army of individual fighters cannot match, or unpredictability they cannot account for. But power always wins. The Earth armies fight a withdrawing battle, bleeding the opponent as much as they can. After the attack on the bridge anchor site, Knowledge’s forces have taken a similar approach, bringing their advancement to a crawl. Unfortunately for Earth, it is proving to be an unstoppable crawl, before which the defenders have been slowly yet inexorably giving ground.”

“Can they outlast Knowledge’s forces? Bleed them to the point that there’s not enough people left to send?”

“Potentially, but you know what I will say next.”

“Knowledge has been planning this for a long time. She has contingencies.”

“Yes.”

***

Lucella Carnes was unyielding in her appearance, from the short, slicked-back hair to the fitted leather armour instead of the robes favoured by her fellow clergy. Of all those who served Knowledge, she was the first, and not among equals. What she hated most in the world was people who failed to grasp that fact, and what she loved most was explaining it to them. She was as stern with herself as with her duties, however, and knew better than to overindulge, so she took her foot off Priest Galloway’s throat. As he scrambled to his feet without pretence of dignity, she returned to her seat.

On the island annexed from the Storm Kingdom, the formal dining hall in the central manor had become the meeting room for these meetings of Knowledge’s chief clergy. Lucella took her seat and looked down the long table, lined with diamond-rankers at her end, eventually shifting to gold-rankers by the other.

“Allow me to rebut Priest Galloway’s point,” she said as Galloways reclaimed his own seat. “He is correct that if we were to inform the Orthodox messengers of the Unorthodoxy’s presence on Earth, that would be more than adequate pretext under the Laws of Intrusion for them to invade. Having them attack the Unorthodoxy presence in Africa would allow us to withdraw from the region, allowing us to reallocate those forces. Priest Galloway’s point is that it would both alleviate our personnel shortage and take the troublesome Africa campaign off our hands.”

The smile Lucella turned on Galloway made him visibly shiver.

“There is a problem with this, however. Having things taken off our hands is explicitly antithetical to THE ENTIRE REASON WE INVADED IN THE FIRST PLACE!”

More shivers went down the table as Lucella composed herself after her outburst.

“I apologise for my zeal, fellow clergyfolk,” she said calmly. “But I would remind the table that the purpose of invading the Earth is to prove that it belongs to our goddess, and the messengers are not famous for sharing. To cede any part of this endeavour to outside command is to surrender the very purpose for which we fight. Which, I hope we can all agree, would be counterproductive. This is a holy war in which any secular desires have no place. We are not here to take land or fight amongst ourselves for position. Priest Galloway’s attempts to go around this table and engage the messengers himself was misguided strategically, but his true sin is much greater.”

Lucella turned to Galloway again.

“I should not have to explain the reasons for not doing what he did for one simple, yet all-important reason: the goddess told us not to. To disobey a directive of the goddess herself is heresy. What possessed you I neither know nor care, Priest Galloway, but I hope it was something not so pedestrian as greed. Regardless, the goddess has but one penalty for heretics.”

Galloway screamed as his divine essence and a number of divine awakening stones floated out of his body and vanished. He went into a massive seizure, falling from his chair to flop onto the ground. Two temple guards entered the room and dragged him away, the screams cut off as the doors to the hall closed behind them. Lucella cast her gaze slowly over the room’s remaining attendees.

“That such a man reached such a height within this august body reflects poorly upon all of us. It falls upon this group to redeem ourselves in the eyes of the goddess, and there is only one offering she desires: success. To that end, are there any suggestions that do not involve selling out the very task with which we have been governed?”

The priests at the table looked around, none speaking up. One of the gold-rankers far down the table raised a nervous hand.

“Priest Venn,” Lucella said. “What do you have?”

“We have already explored the idea of mercenaries,” he said. “They would be under our command, therefore not undercut our authority. The political situation on Pallimustus has precluded us from recruiting in any great number, but perhaps we could look further afield. The messengers are not the only force in the cosmos. My understanding is that our diamond-rankers, in the process of enacting the goddess’ plans, have spent centuries cultivating contacts beyond the reaches of our world.”

Lucella leaned back in her chair, rubbing her chin thoughtfully while the others waited anxiously for her reaction.

“Interesting,” she said. “If we can find payment that would entice them, looking to the greater cosmos would certainly give us a much greater pool of gold-rankers. Diamond as well, when the time comes.”

She got to her feet.

“I shall consult with the goddess on your suggestion, Venn.”

“Thank you, Priestess Carnes,” Venn said with relief.

Lucella observed as the rest of the room looked at Venn with gratitude, interest or antipathy. She mentally scowled at the group who were still caught up in hierarchical politics, even with Galloway’s example right in front of them. This group needed to remember that faith and purpose came before all else, and she would make them learn, one way or another.

***

Lord Anson Cazus was in the imperium’s central information hub, a massive and heavily staffed room that looked a lot like the bridge of a spaceship. Standing at a central console hub, he looked up as Princess Dawn entered through security; even she was not above the screening required to access this room.

“What can I do for the Imperium’s spymaster?” she asked. He noted that she was often more casual in how she comported herself when she’d been spending time with her visitors. At least in relative privacy; her etiquette training remained in effect in public spaces.

“There has been a development on the homeworld of some of your visitors, Princess. The church you’ve had us looking out for has begun seeking to recruit mercenaries from outside of their world. Given how relatively closed-off that world has been, it is an unusual development.”

“And not a welcome one. Earth is not equipped to handle a flood of cosmic mercenaries, even if they are restricted to gold rank.”

“Perhaps it might be more welcome than you think, Princess.”

“Oh?”

“That world is moving to expand its influence cosmically, for the purpose of attacking Earth. That means the restrictions on intervening on Earth’s behalf are likewise loosened. Not to the point where you can wield the Imperium like a hammer, but perhaps it is time to see what imperial training has done for your friends with a little field testing.”

A savage smile crossed Dawn’s face.

“I always liked you, Lord Cazus.”

“No, you didn’t, Princess, but I appreciate the sentiment.”

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