Chapter 1050: Exactly as Intended (Patreon)

Lalia came to her senses in the satellite monitoring room. She was standing, which was an odd way to regain consciousness. She felt strange, hollow and light, and then she looked down at her hands. Disconcertingly, she could see through them. Looking around, Baloc, Aeora and Yujin were likewise transparent, while the former vampire Melissa remained solid. She was the also the only one of them that was on the floor, her clothes tattered and her skin scraped raw, the shallow wounds quickly healing.

“What just happened?” Yujin asked. They looked to the satellite monitors, but they were all displaying ‘looking for signal’ messages.

“That’s a bit complicated,” Jason said, suddenly in the room with them.

“We just watched the vampire impale you,” Baloc said.

“All part of the plan,” Jason assured him.

“That doesn’t seem like a good plan.”

“I will confess that there have been some specific elements of the execution that may have — slightly — gone in a direction I didn’t entirely anticipate.”

***

“Jason, what was that?” Farrah demanded of his avatar.

“What was what?” he asked innocently. Farrah rolled her eyes, giving Arbour a long-suffering glance.

“I’m connected to this whole astral kingdom, Jason. I’m going to notice when it feels like someone jammed a watermelon up its butt.”

“Okay, so I was carrying out this plan, right?”

“One of your plans? Did you kill yourself again and get some insane, reality-shaking consequence you didn’t expect?”

“No!”

“No?”

“I had someone else kill me. The rest was pretty much what you said, yeah.”

“What happened?”

A shadow arch opened next to them.

“You should come with me so I can explain to everyone together.”

***

Now in the briefing room, Lalia watched as two shadow archways appeared and people stepped through. The first produced the vampire, Thadwick, along with Raythe and Jason, making it two Jason Asanos in the room. Thadwick and Raythe both looked severely knocked about, in the same manner as Melissa. The second arch admitted a third Jason, along with two women she didn’t recognise.

“Quick introductions,” Jason said. “Farrah and Arbour, this is Lalia, Baloc, Yujin and Aeora, who are all souls in an afterlife for warriors and champions. Thadwick you’ll remember, please don’t kill him, and that’s Melissa, who used to be a vampire but got better. Raythe is the lady who makes sure people don’t time travel and such.”

“You are terrible at introducing people,” Farrah told him.

“Everyone, this is Arbour, who is the avatar of a living city of trees, and my friend Farrah.”

“Asano, even I don’t understand what is happening here,” Raythe said. “These people should not be able to meet. Some are bound to the afterlife, and the others are forbidden from entering it.”

“Yeah, uh, things may have gone a bit wonky, so let me take you all through this. So, I was in this afterlife and I needed to take out a demigod-level accumulation of corruption, the elimination of which would complete the purgation and let the afterlife return to its regularly scheduled service. So far, so good. Unfortunately, there was bit of a power deficit on my end, which meant I had to try something a little drastic.”

“Here we go,” Farrah muttered.

“You know, I could get through this just fine without your little asides,” Jason told her.

“Too bad,” she told him. “And explain things properly; don’t Jason it all up.”

“I’ll try and be clear. For those who don’t know, I have my own universe. It’s more complicated than that, but for our purposes, that’s what matters. In order to fight the giant corruption thing, I opened up a portal to my universe so I could draw some power from it. The thing is, I needed quite a lot of power, so I did something that I knew would open up that portal in a way that would draw a lot more juice, very quickly, although that much throughput would have an adverse effect on stability. Unfortunately, I underestimated that throughput by quite a lot. Add that to the fact that we’re dealing with a corrupted afterlife and an astral kingdom, neither of which are traditional realities, and there was some unexpected interplay.”

“Jason, what did you do?” Farrah asked.

“Okay, so, to boil it right down, I kind of blew up the planet we were on, sucked it through to my astral kingdom and put it back together again. That didn’t hurt the souls because they’re indestructible, but those us who were alive, more or less, got yanked through as is. I managed to keep them from being shredded by what amounted to a reality sieve, but it was rather rough. But they got through alright and here we are. Basically, what was a planet in the afterlife is now a planet in my astral kingdom.”

“You blew up a planet,” Farrah said.

“And put it back together.”

“You blew up a planet!” Farrah said again.

“I did say the plan didn’t go exactly as intended.”

“Not to mention that you plundered a portion of afterlife,” Raythe added. “Including, it would appear, the souls inhabiting it.”

“Yeah, that’s why some of us are a bit ghosty,” Jasons said. “Not being in the afterlife anymore, they’re loose souls. I’m not allowed to give them physical bodies because that would be resurrecting them, and I sanctioned myself so I couldn’t do that.”

“We’re not in the afterlife anymore?” Lalia asked.

“No,” Jason told her. “Sorry.”

“What’s going to happen to us?” Aeora asked.

“Well,” Jason said, “I can turn off death here, but you’re already dead. Left to your own devices, you’ll gradually head back to the Reaper, who’ll put you back in an afterlife somewhere. Maybe a new one, or he’ll take the one I just cleaned out and install a new planet.”

“What happened to the afterlife we were in?” Yujin asked.

“It was technically cleansed,” Jason said. “It’s a bit empty, now, but the Reaper should be good to fix it up and get it back into service. There is one issue that still needs dealing with, in that regard. You see, when the planet got blown up, dragged here and put back together, the corruption came with it. That’s why the afterlife is cleansed, but I still have to deal with the thing here.”

“Are you saying that the astral kingdom will be corrupted?” Farrah asked.

“Nah,” Jason said. “In the afterlife, I was locked down by all kind of limitations, but this is my house.”

***

Jason looked up at the mountainous giant wearing Raythe’s face. Shade stood beside him as did Gordon and Colin, happy to be finally out of the lifeless realm.

“You know,” Jason said, “this isn’t the first time I’ve had to absorb a god-level undead entity into my soul so I can kill it.”

“I recall, Mr Asano.”

“I don’t think I want this becoming one of my things.”

“Avoiding this in the future would be for the best,” Shade agreed.

“Well, no point faffing about.”

Jason rose into the air, looking around and seeing the god relics scattered across the landscape.

“Probably have to do something about those,” he muttered to himself. “But for right now, waste not, want not.”

Each of the titanic weapons became wreathed in flames before yanking themselves out of the ground and flying over to tear apart the giant. They made short work of it, the dismembered chunks burning up, throwing out thick smoke that obscured the whole area. Soon after, the souls that had been corrupted to create the entity stumbled out of the smoke, freed from the taint that had trapped them.

***

Jason’s astral kingdom was accessible to the wider cosmos through what amounted to a dimensional port, a place where the boundary of the realm was permeable to those capable of dimensional travel. That access point was in front of Jason’s space station that was shaped like his head, the mouth being a giant hangar. A boxy black and white dimensional vessel appeared in front of the mouth, dwarfed by the space station to the point of looking like a snack for the giant head. The ship floated into the hangar, passing through a force field that held in the atmosphere. It didn’t settle on the floor, instead hovering over it. A door opened in the side of the vessel, through which came the familiar figure of Velius who drifted gently to the floor before walking over to Jason.

“Well,” Velius said. “You’ve made quite a mess.”

Jason’s typical look of general amusement was nowhere to be seen. He was in his combat robes, not his floral shirt, and his glowing eyes were fixed firmly of the Reaper’s prime vessel.

“You put a firecracker in a sealed pot, Velius. You don’t get to blame the firecracker when the pot explodes.”

“Everything we did was for a reason, Jason. Including keeping things from you.”

“I get it. You want me to make certain choices, but you can’t just tell me to. It could undermine my journey to diamond, or whatever else you need me to choose for myself. Or I might just tell you to sod off on principle. So, you put me into situations and let my natural proclivities take over. Have Raythe or Dawn or someone give me the occasional prod.”

“Something like that, yes.”

“Well, since you put me here, you don’t get to complain about what I do. Now, I’m the one telling you how things are going to go.”

“That isn’t how this works, Jason.”

“It will be. It’s just a question of how much damage gets done making it happen. Your boss owes me for the role it played in putting me here.”

“The Reaper does not see it that way. What we have done, we did for you, not to you.”

Jason drew in a sharp breath through gritted teeth.

“I’m going to ignore that because I need to talk to the Reaper, which I can’t do after smearing the atoms of his prime vessel across my astral kingdom. Get your boss out here. Now.”

“I serve the Reaper, Jason, not the other way around. I can’t summon it up whenever I like, and you definitely can’t.”

“No? Reaper, you haven’t done enough to make us enemies, yet, but if you don’t get your arse in here and do as you’re damn well told, you’re going on my list. Then I’ll start going down that list, what’s good for the cosmos be damned.”

Velius’ eyes turned to black orbs.

“You’re angry,” The Reaper said.

“I don’t think you understand what anger is, or what made me this way. Have Velius try to explain it to you. What you need to know is what my anger means for you. I’m going to tell you what to do, and you’re either going to do it, or you’re going to refuse. If you accept, I’ll forgive you for helping your son trap me, and for taking me from my friends and family when they need me most. If you refuse, you’re going to see what happens when a guy who can access afterlives goes to war with death itself.”

“You would not do that. That kind of harm is not in your nature.”

“If a system isn’t working, it’s time to overthrow it and build something new. To flip the table on the whole cosmic order. Does that sound like it’s in my nature?”

The Reaper frowned, a rare breach in its normally blank expression.

“It does. What are your demands?”

“Well, the first thing is that I have a lot of relics from dead gods lying around. It doesn’t feel appropriate to grave rob, even though they would be useful, so I’d like you to take them off my hands. Put them back where they should be.”

“A reasonable request.”

“Don’t go mistaking these for requests. And speaking of things taken from the afterlife, I have a lot of formerly-corrupted souls running around my astral kingdom. You’re going to get them some spiritual trauma counselling, and until they get it, you’re not going to claim them back. They stay here until they decide whether to go back to you for afterlife reassignment, or if they come back to life.”

“You cannot resurrect. You sanctioned the power out of yourself.”

 “Yeah. I can’t do it, so that will be on you.”

“I am not going to resurrect the entire population of an afterlife.”

“It won’t be. I’m guessing that most will be looking to get that eternal reward you were meant to give them and didn’t. But if any of them want another shot, they got one. Two, Umber gets locked away. Put him in charge of an afterlife or something, see if a little responsibility helps him to grow up.”

“That is a more acceptable term. How long do you want him sealed away?”

“Until Shade says so. He’s the one Umber has been hurting all this time.”

“I am willing to accede on this point, but the other—”

“Is non-negotiable. You will answer to me, one way or another. Just be glad I didn’t demand you bring back everyone who died protecting the Earth, sorely tempted as I was. The Cosmic Throne will only permit so much, and I’d rather not have to break it again.”

“I do not believe that you would go so far as to cause harm in the cosmos out of anger.”

Jason glanced at Shade, standing silently beside him.

“You’ve tested my resolve before, Reaper. How did that go for you?”

Velius’ eyes returned to normal. He shook his head to clear the disorientation and looked Jason square in the eye.

“He accepts.”

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