Chapter 395 - Oh Shit Oh Fuck It's The Storm (Patreon)

Merry christmas to all who celebrate, and to all, a good night.

Next chapter's gonna be a fuckin doozy.

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WARNING! WARNING! ALTERATIONS TO CURRENT PROJECTIONS IMMINENT! BRACE FOR ESCHATOLOGICAL IMPACT! BRACE FOR DAMAGE TO ONTOLOGY! WARNING! WARNING!

GLORY BE.

-Official documentation from the Department of Eschatology, Mortaria, Second District, Office of Bishop Ruk Citra

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The approaching army, ever-rotating, ever shaping and reforming, floats closer by the hour. Every preemptive defensive measure has been defeated, every defeat carefully analyzed and explored, and the final wave will provide the sort of singular, overwhelming force required to bring things to an end. 

A thousand years. A thousand since the last major inter-city conflict, since the Corpse Martyr broke the faith with its shameful beliefs. This is hardly so impressive a war, hardly anything that might collapse some of the remaining cities or reduce the Fallen Kingdom’s power so drastically. The cities and spaces lost to the End in that conflict still remain as black marks against the Church, and this little spat, this trial by fire, is borderline tame by comparison. 

Shameful, thinks Bishop Cestis. Shameful, how Viviae capitulated, and how quickly. They could have endured far more, even in that soft, fungal mess of a city. It’s one thing to accept the strength of this new Bishop, that’s more than fine, but it could have been done properly after she was shown her place, when she better understood the depths of power of the Church. Now, it falls to Mortaria’s strength of arms to properly impart that lesson, seeing as the artists and hedonists have both decided to indulge the upstart.

She’s impressive, to be sure. Anyone who can rise so quickly through Lichdom from mortality is a rare talent, bought and paid for just in time for the incoming End and the war against it. To have a Blessed Mortal alongside? A stroke of luck, and if the newest Bishop wants to keep her claim to it for a while, that’s fine too- best to let it properly develop, slow and steady. 

But to have two cities, of the few remaining, of the only four central factions left in the Kingdom to actively support her? Directly back the foolishness of this mess, this wasteful detraction from proper slow and steady preparations?

Insulting. 

Bishop Cestis shifts a piece of its form, the city atop its structure moving in tune with the thrumming forces of Death beneath it. The collapsing furnaces, buried in recursive, atom-breaking patterns within the underground of Mortaria, send little ripples of energy up to the vast towers above, making them hum and whistle against the wind.

A thousand years since the last conflict, and it eclipsed this one by an order of magnitude. Even then, Mortaria stood. Even then, the Bishops and Arch-Bishop of the industrial heart of the Fallen kingdom remained, surpassed the inevitability of End, and have grown. 

There are more important matters than the struggles of ants and temporary things. Let this distant Empire do as it wills, so long as it does not break the largest taboos. The Cold Sun trembles, the End beyond it eager to consume- all else is nothingness in the face of that. What care does a necromancer have for whether a body dies by bullet or by blade, so long as its Death can be realized? 

The wind, moved only by the smog and smoke of the churning industry above, sings a slow, haunting tune through the spires above. Thin, rail-like spikes stab upwards into the air, the towers below belching fumes from the hundreds of chimneys that connect to each of them, allowing parts of the city below to exist for brief periods without ash and soot. 

A landscape of metal, flame, and sharp-edged architecture stretches from horizon to horizon, even to the eyes of a being like Bishop Cestis. A corner of the world, remade in the image of blessed creation from Death. 

And, across the world, past where mortal sight can reach, a tribe of upstarts, whimsically bound to a fresh-faced and ignorant new Bishop, seeks to challenge them. 

It’s insulting. 

It’s downright fucking shameful. 

In less than an hour, they will be in range for the most overwhelming possible appropriate response. Whatever it was that led Bishop Anaya to so thoroughly break protocol, here, in the place of power of Mortaria’s clergy, there is no need. Each and every response to the prepared defensive lines has been measured, examined, analyzed, truths and facets revealed and extrapolated from every enemy action. Flying constructs, hidden beyond the clouds and above the bulk of the atmosphere, have tracked every step of their journey, and sensory devices buried under the ground have recorded exacting measurements of their capabilities.

There is always more unknown, but what is unknown can be learned by examining what is. There is no method of manipulation of force that the fools who have wandered from their graves of power can produce that cannot be accounted for. 

And as they approach the optimal location, the perfect alignment for the most overwhelming amount of force to be delivered at the most acceptable, appropriate level, Bishop Cestis feels…

Less confident than it expected to.

Victory is assured, yes. Projections were very clear on that, and remain so as of a few moments prior. Cognition-engines and pistoning mechanisms deep beneath the city, integrated with its very foundations, hum with the thoughts running through them. Vats of tissue, filling with cancerous cells that are then harvested for the Death they embody and experience, fill endless tunnels of enchanted material with pounding Echo-matter and Death-aspected Qi. 

Miles below the surface, towers that extend past mortal sight stir, the enhanced and enchanted corpses within them stirring at the discomfort of their master.

Everything is ready. Nothing has been neglected as a possibility. Even should the newest Bishop self-destruct in a fit of pique, enough will be recorded and stored that she may likely be re-summoned by the right experts, if the Church so decides. Bishop Glorianna, Bishop Seo En-Hyun, Bishop Lu Karai, Kai Valdir, the Eneru hangers-on- all of their capabilities are well known and factored in. Even outlier factors, like the Blessed Mortal, the Craft-users accompanying their clerical better, the expeditionary army approaching on those ridiculous floating islands, they’ve all been accounted for.

In the sky above, the particles of smoke and ash prepared for this exact purpose shift into place, beginning to form a true and grand array, a formation spanning miles, unbroken. Beneath the ground, embedded explosives and conductive pylons have been prepared, ready to reflect and magnify the effects of each other in a perfectly contained, concentrated pillar of power. Within the city proper, hundreds of emplacements armed with thousands of unique munitions are prepared to fire the instant every single firing line is equally clear.

And yet.

There’s something in the air. A presence. A… pressure. Like grains of sand, running through Cestis’ mechanisms, out of place. Nothing that interrupts the movement, that breaks the machinery, but an awareness of the fact that it’s not as perfect, as certain, as sharp as it should be.

Anxiety is an alien thing. Certainty is a trait most valuable, most essential, in the face of the uncertainty of existence. To grow in power, to gain the scale and scope that a being such as the Bishop Cestis exists at, requires the ability to command reality, not be commanded by it. Truth, Comprehension, Death, Craft- all these things shape the world, and refuse to be broken upon its wheel. Removed from base neurology, having experienced millenia of understanding and development and power, anxiety is a leftover, a vestigial organ. 

Anxiety is an animal, functioning as a system when faced by the unknown.

True power comes from being more than any unknown. Comes from having certainty, even in the face of danger, of confusion, of instinct or incomprehension. 

And yet.

They’re close now. An approaching wave, a force of Cestis’ own allies, turned to this flippant, childish display. It feels the other Bishops of Mortaria shifting, putting smaller projects on hold as attention turns to the fools approaching them. The grandest of the towers opens some of its eyes, glass and corpse-gelatin swiveling towards the army. A district of blackened iron and lead, churning out endless munitions and armors, bubbles with awareness, corpses enmeshed with machinery and gears turning blind eyes toward the horizon. Atop a many-limbed construct of cracked bone, its breaks filled in with mercury, a figure made entirely of crystalline arches and hovering, orbiting voids turns one of the black holes that hovers around it towards the oncoming Change.

Bishop Cestis pauses. 

‘The oncoming change’? 

What made it think that?

The army reaches the placement for ideal retribution.

Hundreds of thousands of guns, dozens of pylons, atmospheric-tier magics, tectonic-tier explosives, all come alive instantaneously, all move to strike at and obliterate Mortaria’s siblings. Even one of the preparations has a chance of wiping out the floating islands- all together, they have been calculated to ensure that every single one of the beings in that army that matters will continue to exist, scarred and damaged though they will be. 

The world collapses inward as the ground is torn open. A pillar of divine Death explodes, transmuted into force and Concept and consequence, embracing destruction and annihilation both. The pylons trap and redirect every ounce of the force that would be wasted, turning it inward into another, more closely directed force, carving inwards to the main pillar. 

The energy strikes the sky, and the ash shaped to the array in the skies above activates, warping space, warping time, condensing reality below it, manifesting massive, sharpened spikes of concept-altering hyper-dense Echo-matter. The pierce downwards into the beam that fuels them, opening channels and piercing the arrays placed beneath them, glowing and gaining more power with each broken defense. Through the gaps created, a city-sized fusillade fires, munitions carved of thousands of different materials to hundreds of different formulas thundering through the air and into their assigned targets. 

A theoretical, metaphorical twitch runs through Bishop Cestis as he observes. 

There’s no reaction from their defenses. No attempts to retreat. Seo En-Hyun, that battle-junkie, fails to emerge from his tower and try to punch away the problems. Glorianna’s well-known artistry in array-based magics fails to manifest, save for the baseline enchantments keeping the islands afloat. Not even the shadows and gold of Lu Karai emerge, nor rogue beasts and alien life born from the Eneru clans, make an appearance.

Enough force to reshape a continent strikes at a point barely a few miles across.

Obliteration drowns the world. 

The collapsing atoms of Cestis’ furnaces still for a moment. The theoreticals were all built on the assumption that obviously, they would anticipate this attack. Obviously they’d try to defend themselves. It still shouldn’t put them past returning from the End, even still, but…

Annihilation, tailor-made to devastate and cripple and unmake those who strayed from their proper place, runs unimpeded through the world. 

The world goes white and shadowless from the force of it.

The ground trembles and the skies shudder.

The full and tailored force of one of the world’s oldest and most powerful civilizations acts exactly as intended and designed.

And then… 

It doesn’t.

Something CHANGEs.

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It’s so fucking sexy when a plan comes together. 

It’s also incredibly painful, but that can sometimes be part of the appeal. 

Besides, Pain is an old friend by now.

It took a few days to build the conduit for the ritual. It took a few weeks to refine it. It took months to come up with the idea in the first place. 

The entire time that Raika has been in the Fallen Kingdom, she’s been confronted by a multitude of different powers. New concepts and new ways to use them, new applications of Qi and sanity-defying sapience. She’s spent a lot of that time experiencing them first hand, from a multitude of different teachers. 

She wouldn’t have figured out this trick on her own. The idea, sure, but the trick itself… that’s only possible because Li Shu and Jin were here. Because of the little piece of metal hanging around her throat, which has been silently storing its power ever since it brought her back from her first Death. 

As the islands of Godsfall approached Mortaria, she told everyone but herself, Li Shu, and Jin to leave. 

It took some convincing, but less than she expected. Seo En-Hyun and Glorianna were weirdly allied in bitterness at seeing her take their traveling war-homes, but after she assured them that they could take whatever parts they wanted with them, so long as she kept the main islands, they acquiesced. 

Still they were too crowded. A literal army was on those floating obelisks, after all, with nowhere to go that wouldn’t put them squarely in Mortaria’s view. Only some of that army were sentient beings and not necromantic constructs, so that did alleviate some pressure to evacuate, but not entirely. 

Unless, of course, someone were to just… teleport all the officers and mages and people in the army away. Aaaaaall the way back to Godsfall.

In the wider scale of things, It didn’t take much convincing. 

When she brought the idea to Glorianna, she framed it pretty honestly- if her trick works, then the army won’t be needed, and if it doesn’t, Godsfall will have publicly pulled its support for her just in time for her to get annihilated. Either way, a victory for the Bishops.

The bitch was almost so eager she moved her shell. Not quite, but Raika saw the motion almost start. 

She also, of course, politely offered to evacuate the others of her group, to take Jin and Li Shu under her wing. A final act of goodwill, offered freely.

Raika declined.

Glorianna politely insisted.

She declined again. Harder. 

Not to be defeated so easily, Glorianna graciously allowed her to use the central chambers of the war-formation, most enriched by the arrays and runic mastery of the Bishop, so as to better manifest the effect desired.

Raika agreed, and pretended she saw that as a total victory, and not just another move. 

The logistical question came next, of course. How to disguise such a working? It would create ripples in reality, and anyone with eyes could feel the way that Qi and Death-essence would shift out of space with the transportation.

Somehow, it had to be covered by something else. 

Like, say, a single Bishop, single-handedly dealing with the frontal advance through most of Mortaria’s probing defenses. Infusing her power into the space around her. Burning through enough Death to kill herself a dozen times over, only barely recouping it with each assault, leaving reality a mess of sloppy but potent magics. 

Convenient, that.

They finalized the teleportation at the final hurdle before Mortaria proper, over a day before it appeared over the horizon. 

Glorianna, Lu Karai, and the Viviae Bishops all left, though some of them stuck around to witness, she assumes. 

Bishop Seo En-Hyun decided to stick around. When asked why?

“I wouldn’t wish to miss such a performance.”

Flattering. Simultaneously a little annoying, but she’d be too much of a hypocrite to stand herself if she disliked him for that. 

And then… the day.

Approaching the city, she could almost feel the aura of smug satisfaction, the slow, entropic beat of Mortaria’s heart. Its spires, belching smoke and magic into the air, sucking in the Death of the world around them like air, made the horizon look spiked and jagged. The sky above became a black screen, darker than any natural cloud, almost obsidian in hue. The world reduced to the rumbling of machines and plodding corpses, the glow of furnaces, and the pitch-dark sky they reflected off of. 

She stood in the central church, its doors thrown open, feet planted and eye sockets full of black petals aimed at the city. 

Behind her, seated in a close, ornately carved circle of magical formula she barely understands, is Li Shu. Her Sacrifice has been turned to something more like armor, every one of her needles fused into a singular suit of flesh-like shielding fitted to her form. Only her nail-beds remain exposed singular points of crimson against a backdrop of off-white form. 

To one side, wrapped in a bubble of altered space, compressed until he’s both right next to them and a hundred miles away, sits Rai Jin. His eyes are clear and focused, his Qi pushed to its limits to enhance his vision, surrounded by Centi-croc’s toughened scales and further surrounded by additional barriers set up beforehand.

They approached.

She waited.

And then.

She felt it the moment before it happened. Less than a second, and not enough time for her to react even at her peak.

It’s so fucking sexy when a plan comes together. 

The promised annihilation that Mortaria’s defences were made to prepare Obliterates reality all around her and the island she’s on in a single, all-consuming pillar of light and Qi. The sky above feeds off of the Oblivion reaching it, forming spears like spider’s limbs or mechanical scalpels to stab down into the army through the arrays defending it, already burning incandescent in the quarter-second since the blast began.

A recursive loop of demi-divine Annihilation fills the world with more Qi and Death-Concept than she’s felt in an entire country of necromancers, all at once. It makes Bishop Anaya’s eternal detonation look like a grenade, lethal, but ultimately lesser. 

Raika just smiles.

Lit by a glow so potent that it erases all shadows, even inside the church they stand in, she waits for her cue. 

The damage builds. The arrays crack. Dozens of islands are shattered and then unmade at a near-atomic level, leaving only the ones deemed unimportant or which were already eroding. 

The building starts to evaporate from the force of the attack, the defensive arrays crackling. 

Jin, to one side, does exactly what he promised to do. 

He sits, covered in a smaller, much denser bubble of runes, already pulling energy from out of the energy leaking through the wards to power itself, and watches her carefully.

The wards start to fail entirely. Only the inner courtyard still remains, with the outer formations starting to shatter, the spell-formulae warping and being impaled by building-sized spears of magical Obliteration, thrusting in through the bars of Blacksteel ornately organized into a pyramid-like shape in the center of the space-

Li Shu gives the signal.

Simultaneously, every one of the anchors inside Raika’s body, made from Li Shu’s Sacrifice, break. 

The source of the magic which tethers her Qi and consciousness to reality are unmade entirely. 

Her body collapses into a puddle, instantly falling apart into corpse-matter, bone, and worms, and a jar.

Her consciousness breaks.

For a moment, there’s nothing.

She blends into the Obliteration as she’s unmade, left as an anchorless ghost that starts to fade-

What’s left of her existence touches against the Blacksteel pyramid she’s made around the ritual site.

Sharp-edged Death-From-End, infused with weeks worth of runes and carefully-made ritual formula, cuts through something that almost doesn’t exist and holds it in place, at the cost of agony.

Without a mouth, she screams. 

She flails.

She hurts.

She remembers that a good mother, a better mother than her, wouldn’t risk Jin just to give him an opportunity, would never have locked herself into so many bad alternatives of where he could go instead.

She understands that the world is a cruel and miserable place and that it is Dying just as she is. 

She sees, past the impossible light of the spell unmaking the world around her, a perfect orb made of perfect shapes and perfect angles.

Through a ceiling and a beam of light and cloud cover darker than stone, she sees the Cold Sun, and a glimpse of the one behind it.

Raika’s third canopic jar, holding the final Gu, breaks.

Reality turns to LOOK.